Roseanne Barr hasn’t appeared in much since 2018, when a reboot of her hit show Roseanne was canceled. As she looks to make a comeback now, she’s reflected on the last six years since.
Barr is best known for her starring role in the hit sitcom Roseanne, which was based on a character created by Barr. After ending in 1997 as one of the most successful television shows ever, the show was rebooted in 2018, with Barr and many of the original stars returning.
The revival aired eight episodes for a 10th season of the show, and was renewed for an 11th season consisting of 13 episodes. However, the series was abruptly canceled by ABC after Barr published offensive posts on X (then Twitter) about Barack Obama advisor Valerie Jarrett, saying the half-Black staffer looked like a “muslim brotherhood & planet of the apes had a baby.”
Barr was promptly fired from the show, which was retooled into a spin-off called The Conners. Her character was written out of the show as well, and it went on to air for seven seasons.
What is Roseanne Barr’s new TV show about?Now, Barr is attempting a comeback. She is independently producing her own single-camera sitcom, Meemaw: A Modern Day Fable. The series is loosely based on her own life in Texas Hill Country, and follows the story of a mixed-race family that runs into troubles with the law as they try to raise money for their granddaughter’s bat mitzvah. No release information for the show is available yet, as Barr has seemingly not found a network to work with yet.
Speaking to The Hollywood Reporter, Barr briefly spoke about her new series, and the controversy she found herself in. She mentioned that the new series acted as a sort of “healing” for her, especially in regards to working with Black actors. “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,” said Barr.
On the topic of her offensive post that led to her firing, Barr maintains the post was not meant to be racist (Barr has long maintained that she did not know Jarrett was Black), but instead about the politics behind it.
“It was not a racist tweet. It wasn’t about race, it was about politics. What it really was was a three-month conversation between myself and journalists in Iran who were talking about attacks mostly on Iranian women in the streets,” said Barr. “And what I meant was the Muslim Brotherhood, of which Valerie Jarrett is part. [Barr offers no evidence for this allegation.] Planet of the Apes is my favorite movie. [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.”
Barr also touched on some other topics, including how she’s no longer in contact with her Roseanne castmates anymore, a situation she says she was “heartbroken” about at the beginning.
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