Close to a decade has passed since ABC cancelled the rebooted Roseanne over Roseanne Barr’s racist tweet, rebooting the show without its titular character as The Conners, and now Barr is attempting a return to TV on her own terms. The comedienne has financed
a pilot for Meemaw: A Modern Day Fable herself. “I whored my ass up and down Hollywood Boulevard,” she joked in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter. In actuality, the actress, who made $1 million an episode on Roseanne, split the costs of production with Just the News founder John Solomon. Barr hopes to find distribution for the series.
The show will feature a character living a life similar to her own, in Texas Hill Country, as the head of a mixed-race “prepper” family, meaning people preparing for end times. The show also stars Drea de Matteo, Omar Gooding, Randy Quaid, and Jon Lovitz.
Barr, who attempted a standup comedy comeback between Roseanne and Meemaw, said she found working with Gooding as “healing” since he’s a Black man. “I met a lot of resistance casting Black actors,” she said. “We had a lot of really great Black comedians audition for the role. A lot of people said no, they wouldn’t. ‘How could any Black person work with me?’ That hurt me.”
She chalked the resistance up to her 2018 tweet in which she compared Valerie Jarrett, an Obama advisor who is Black, to an ape. “Muslim brotherhood & planet of the apes had a baby=vj,” she wrote at the time. She told The Hollywood Reporter that she still believes that tweet was political, not racist. She also reiterated her claim that Jarrett was a member of the Muslim Brotherhood without evidence, as well as her claim that she wrote the tweet under the influence of Ambien.
“Planet of the Apes is my favorite movie,” she said. “[Screenwriter] Rod Serling said it was an analogy for what the Nazis did to the Jews. I always called the government in Iran ‘Planet of the Apes,’ because that is exactly what they do. In the movie Planet of the Apes, a militarized police force arrests human beings for speaking and reading, and that is exactly what they did to the women of Iran. That is a movie about fascism; it is not a movie about Black people.”
She found out she’d been fired from Roseanne because of the tweet the next day when her boyfriend told her ABC had called and described the tweet as racist. “And I said, quote, and everyone in the house heard me, I said, ‘Muslim is not a race,'” she told THR. “And my boyfriend says, ‘No, they say she’s Black.’ And I’m like, ‘Oh, fuck. What?’ And so I called ABC back and they put me through, and it was [then–ABC President] Ben Sherwood. And first thing he says to me is, ‘What possible excuse can you have for the egregious thing you have done?’ And so I just swallow hard and I go, ‘Well, I thought she was white.'”
Barr told The Hollywood Reporter that ABC told her she had to sign off on letting the network do the show without her or everyone who worked on Roseanne would lose their job. She said she signed away her rights to the show the show if producer Tom Werner would say she wasn’t racist, which he did. She claimed in the interview, though, that she did not get paid for The Conners, the rebooted series without her.
Barr also expressed resentment over the way the show wrote off her character, claiming Roseanne Conner died of an opioid overdose. “I really wanted to talk about the opioid crisis in our country,” Barr said. “So they killed me with an opioid overdose. Wow, I’m really grateful that they didn’t have me robbing an orphanage or raping some kids. That was a nice way to kill America’s mom. Drug overdose.” At the time, Barr called her character’s death “grim and morbid.”
Elsewhere in the interview, Barr reflected on the mistake she made trying to make singing the National Anthem funny in 1990, acting with Meryl Streep in She-Devil, and her friendship with Lisa Marie Presley. “She said [Michael Jackson] was the best lay and he had it going on,” she said. “She said he told her all the things girls want to hear.” (Unfortunately, she did not address her role in Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s 2024 video in which he told her about moving the body of a dead bear cub in Central Park.)
She also said she has no friendship with former castmates John Goodman or Laurie Metcalf. “My son called Goodman and asked him to do a cameo on Meemaw and he declined,” she said.
In a 2023 interview with Rolling Stone, Goodman said he no longer spoke with Barr and that he found revisiting Roseanne’s Dan Conner character strange after the fallout of the tweet. “I just had to put aside some of my own feelings,” he said. “I liked the show, I liked what we were doing, and wanted to continue.”
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