Roseanne Barr accused ABC of spying on her and giving the funniest lines on her sitcom Roseanne to costar John Goodman prior to her firing.
“They spied. They monitored everything I did. They wanted to censor me from the very beginning,” Barr, 72, told the Daily Mail in an interview published on Friday, May 30.
Barr was fired from ABC’s revival of her classic sitcom Roseanne in 2018 due to backlash over a racist tweet. Barr wrote that former White House aide Valerie Jarrett resembled a combination of the “Muslim Brotherhood + Planet of the Apes.” The comedian publicly apologized “for making a bad joke about [Jarrett’s] politics and her looks” at the time.
ABC subsequently revamped the Roseanne revival into The Conners, which killed off the Roseanne Conners character and subsequently ran for seven seasons before its April finale.
In her latest interview, Barr insisted her critics “hijacked that tweet and made out [that] it said something that it didn’t.” Barr described a tense atmosphere on set before her firing where the Roseanne creative team allegedly toned down her conservative humor in favor of giving Goodman more jokes.
Despite Roseanne Barr‘s absence from The Conners, her character was still front and center on the final season. Roseanne originally aired on ABC from 1988 to 1997. After being briefly revived in 2018 — and after Barr’s eventual exit from the series amid controversial social media posts — the story transformed into The Conners. The […]
“[The writers] were aghast. They said people are not gonna go for [conservative humor]. I go, ‘Working class people are like this – they are not like your wife. They don’t have servants,’” Barr insisted. “It’s all just elitists from Harvard. They did think the audience was deplorable, [whether] Democrat or Republican, at that time.”
Barr claimed she was simply biding her time in the early days of the Roseanne reboot so she could eventually make sweeping creative changes to the show.
“I thought to myself, when this show goes to number one, here are the people I will fire. So I named everybody,” she claimed. “Right after that, everyone who was on the bad boy and girl Santa list, they were fired as a motherf*****.”
John Goodman and Roseanne Barr in March 2018. Astrid Stawiarz/Getty Images for SiriusXM
Us Weekly has reached out to ABC for a response.
April’s series finale of The Conners featured flashback footage of many iconic Roseanne characters, though Barr was left out. Executive producers Bruce Helford, Dave Caplan and Bruce Rasmussen later confirmed to Deadline that Barr’s absence was “contractual.”
Helford did credit Barr with allowing The Conners to move forward at ABC after she was let go by the network.
“When she realized it would be putting 300 people out of work when the initial reboot was canceled, she gracefully allowed us to continue without her,” the producer said. “It really was about these people. This show was really about the lives of these other people in the family, the Conners, and we wanted to focus on them.”
Roseanne Barr is no stranger to controversy. Long before ABC chose to cancel the reboot of Roseanne in 2018, the actress made headlines for a variety of reasons including a controversial National Anthem performance and a run for president. Years after Barr’s Roseanne character was killed off The Conners, Us Weekly learned exclusive details about […]
Barr’ son Jake Pentland told Us that his mother had not even been aware that The Conners was ending in April.
“We don’t care about cheap knockoffs. We support the real brands,” Pentland told Us in April. “We only pay attention to things that matter to the American people.”
After she was fired from Roseanne, Barr moved to a 30-acre property called “Hill Country” in Texas with Pentland, his wife and their two daughters.
“Roseanne also drives the tractor often, which allows her to mow the lawn. She drives around. She occasionally runs into trees, but just keeps the yard up,” Pentland joked.
Barr has resumed her stand-up comedy career as well, including debuting her latest special Cancel This! on Fox Nation in 2023. She lent her voice to the animated show Mr. Birchum alongside Megyn Kelly and series creator Adam Carolla.
