Long time coming
As the acclaimed poet Maya Angelou once said, “When someone shows you who they are, believe them—the first time.” That wise adage hasn’t made its way to television executives, apparently, who can’t help hiring—and rehiring—some of the industry’s worst known repeat offenders.
ABC, which rebooted the one-time hit comedy Roseanne this year as a paean to Trump’s America, just canceled the ratings juggernaut after a wave of racist tweets by controversial comic Roseanne Barr went viral.
In the tweets, Barr suggested Chelsea Clinton was related to liberal billionaire activist George Soros—she isn’t—and then called Soros a Nazi. Worse, she said of former Obama administration adviser Valerie Jarrett: “Muslim brotherhood & planet of the apes had a baby=vj.”
That Barr has gone ahead on Twitter and revealed herself to be an unhinged, mouth-breathing, racist conspiracy monger isn’t the strange part.
It’s that she’s revealed herself again.
ABC falsely believed they hired Roseanne the Character—a blue-collar everywoman who was sharp-tongued but fun-loving and, yes, a Trump supporter.
But what they got was Roseanne the Person, who is, to put it politely, a nutjob.
What’s their excuse for hiring her again? Remember, this is a woman who was an early supporter of birtherism, has compared Muslims to Nazis, took to Twitter regularly to attack citizens both private and public, floated wild conspiracy theories, and bullied Trump opponents with racist, homophobic and anti-Semitic insults.
She infamously dressed up as Hitler for a photo shoot and posed with burnt “Jew cookies,” and has promoted anti-Semitic personalities like Holocaust-denier Gilad Atzmon.
As risks go, she came with a ton of it. How did ABC think this would go? Suddenly becoming a network star again would put the crazy back in the bottle? Sorry, that’s not how it works.
Need more proof? When Rosie O’Donnell returned to The View in 2015, she promised “a calmer version” of herself, according to Variety, after previously bouncing from the program in 2007 and leaving a single season in, before her contract was through. But it was only a matter of time before O’Donnell’s famous temper, ego and unwillingness to work well with others resulted in her second departure, just five months in.
Then there’s everybody’s favorite misogynist, Keith Olbermann, the putrid living embodiment of Bobby Riggs and Ernest Hemingway. He was just rehired by ESPN for SportsCenter, the sixth time the network has hired him.
The very brief overview of his career highlights include:
Calling Education Secretary Betsy DeVos an awful word, slurring Ann Coulter as a “guy [who] wants to live his life as a woman,” calling conservative commentator Michelle Malkin a “big mashed-up bag of meat with lipstick on it,” and yours truly as “the perfect demonstration of the necessity of the work Planned Parenthood does.”
OK, so maybe he only hates a certain kind of woman.
He’s been suspended and/or fired by nearly every outlet he’s worked for including ESPN, MSNBC, and CurrentTV, which said at the time, “Current was … founded on the values of respect, openness, collegiality, and loyalty to our viewers. Unfortunately these values are no longer reflected in our relationship with Keith Olbermann and we have ended it.”
The new(ish) face of ESPN, ladies and gentlemen.
Why bad people—who are bad to other people—keep getting hired after they have proven themselves time and again is a mystery to me.
But they’ll be fine. The worst part of this is the vast numbers of talented people left in their wake.
Castmates like John Goodman and Sara Gilbert took a chance on Roseanne and Roseanne and are now left holding the bag. Likely dozens of crew members, writers and producers are also without a job suddenly. Same for every failed Olbermann venture and O’Donnell flop.
With a world teeming with fresh new talent, it seems wholly unnecessary to keep going back to the same, polluted wells that reliably end up stinking up the joint.
S.E. Cupp is the host of S.E. Cupp Unfiltered on HLN.