Roseanne Barr has a new documentary out on Tuesday, and she's making the media rounds. She also has some interesting things to say about that infamous tweet that got her canned from her own show, about the executives at ABC, about who the real racists are, and about how decades ago, she chose life when she found herself pregnant as a teenager... and how it ended up being one of her greatest rewards in the end.
Let's start with what happened in 2018, shall we? Because I think it says a lot more about the executives at ABC than it does about Roseanne. If you'll recall, ABC decided to revive Barr's hit 1990s sitcom "Roseanne" during the late 2010s, but Barr tweeted something stupid about Barack Obama advisor Valerie Jarrett (the tweet said, "muslim brotherhood & planet of the apes had a baby=vj"), and everyone decided it was racist. The actress and comedian apologized, but it wasn't enough. She was fired from the show, which was eventually canceled, and demonized by the woke mob, which was largely led by Disney CEO Bob Iger.
(Before I go any further, let me just add that while it was a stupid thing to say in this day and age, and only she knows, but I personally don't believe Barr intended it as some sort of racist statement. I also think she's a comedian who came up in the 1970s and 1980s when there was no woke mob to bow to, and you could get away with saying something stupid from time to time without it ruining your career. I also think there are many people in Hollywood to do things that are much, much worse and don't get in trouble for it, but I guess they support the right candidates. I digress.)
Anyway, shortly before the revival of the new and not improved "Roseanne" show began, Barr told the Hollywood Reporter that she supported Donald Trump for president, and she thinks that's probably the real reason why ABC wanted her off the air. They were basically just "waiting for me to slip up," she said in a recent interview with the Daily Mail. She added, "They spied. They monitored everything I did. They wanted to censor me from the very beginning.” She admits she'd never really been comfortable with the direction the show was going in the first place anyway.
She also claims that "They hijacked that tweet and made out it said something that it didn’t," adding, "I’m not stupid. I would never refer to a black person as the product of an ape." In fact, she concludes that Iger and others who bashed her were the racist ones. "They were so racist that they thought my tweet said black people look like monkeys when it was about ‘Planet of the Apes,’ which is a movie about fascism. Rod Serling himself said it’s about the Jews in Germany. It is not a movie about black people, Bob."
"It’s Marxism 101. Accuse the other side of what you yourself are guilty of,” she explained in a recently published interview with Variety. “Divide the people on class."
Here's something else people may not know about the revival of "Roseanne." Barr was hoping it would actually unite people who were divided over Trump's first term. In fact, she saw it as something that could be anti-racist, but she claims ABC execs hated the idea:
When I said I was going to have a black granddaughter, they went out of their f***ing minds over that. They just couldn’t have it. My idea was to have my son and his black wife and their daughter moved in the house. And because I have black people and Democrats in my [real-life] family, I wanted to show how we do it, which I think is the way all Americans do. You just love each other in spite of your differences. I knew that they weren’t gonna let me do it, but as on the first show, I said, "No, I am gonna do it, and I’m gonna be number one, and then you’ll be kissing my a** or firing me."
What did the network want instead? LGBTetc. stuff. Barr told Variety, "Sara Gilbert comes in and said, ‘Well, I think the thing now is that people are more interested in their kids being gender fluid, and I think it’s Darlene that would come home with her gender fluid son who wears dresses. And I was like, ‘Oh Christ."
Barr stood strong on the "black granddaughter" storyline, earning kudos from even "The View" host Whoopi Goldberg. Apparently, ABC couldn't handle it. "But the s*** they wrote for [actress Jayden Rey who played the granddaughter] was putrid. So f***ing racist and sneering and g****** classist. And I said, ‘You’ve got to get black writers in here. She’s not going to say none of this s***."
Barr says she regrets issuing an apology about her tweet and takes it back now, offering a warning to others: "The worst mistake you can do is apologize to the left. Then they are on a crusade against you. Once you admit a mistake, they will keep on until you’re dead."
What she doesn't regret is that the tweet led to something bigger. She told Variety, "I was already having nightmares about never going back to that show, and God woke me up. I had my laptop there in bed, as always, and I opened it, and there was [an X post with] a picture of Valerie Jarrett next to Helena Bonham Carter in full makeup as Ari in ‘Planet of the Apes,’ and they looked like Xerox copies of each other, so I captioned it,” she said, adding, “This was in the middle of my three-month conversations with journalists in Iran who were telling me about the loss of women’s rights there due to the Iran deal. And I was irate.”
She continued: "The way I feel about it is that God told me to do what I did, and it was a nuclear bomb. The day of my tweet, over 2 million Americans Googled Valerie Jarrett and the Iran deal. And that was my intent. So, whatever."
On another note, People magazine reports that in Barr's new documentary, she tells the story of how she found herself pregnant at the age of 18 and decided to give the baby up for adoption. She says her parents sent her to a home for unwed mothers, and when she gave birth to her daughter, she looked at the baby and said, "I’ll see you again when you're 18 because I’m not going to change my name, and I’m going to be famous. I’m going to have my own show named 'Roseanne.'"
Years later, the National Enquirer exposed the story and even dug up the girl and her parents' personal information, something that was upsetting at the time, but now Barr said she is grateful and has an excellent relationship with her firstborn.
Barr's documentary "Roseanne Barr is America" is available today on streaming platforms, and Rotten Tomatoes describes it as "Roseanne recounts the untold story of her unusual upbringing and her successful career in comedy and television. Roseanne exposes cancel culture and the political forces that must be overcome for America to survive as a free nation."
I haven't personally watched it yet, but I think I will later this week. Sure, she is controversial, but I grew up watching the original run of "Roseanne" with my mom, and we loved it because it was real, so she's always had kind of a soft spot in my heart.
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