Do you remember, a few outrage cycles ago, when Roseanne got canceled because of its lead actress’ racist tweet?
It was spring of 2018, and Roseanne Barr said former Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett was the product of the “muslim brotherhood & planet of the apes.” Barr was swiftly sacked by ABC, though why the network hired the loose cannon for the show’s revival in the first place is a mystery.
Well, not too much of a mystery. Roseanne was bringing in heavy viewership, though it had diminished by the time Barr popped an Ambien and started tweeting.
To many conservatives, Roseanne was appealing and, as a show that depicted Trump supporters with even a little bit of sympathy, rare. Too bad Barr, once mislabeled as a conservative heroine, is more provocateur and right-wing populist than conservative.
Now Roseanne writer and producer Whitney Cummings is speaking out about the downfall of the show, and her comments explain why shows like Roseanne are important — and stars such as Roseanne are not.
“There’s this huge disconnect between Hollywood writers and America,” Cummings told the Daily Beast on Wednesday. “And there’s this idea among some Hollywood writers that America’s stupid.”
Cummings said the show helped lower-income families and people in red states feel “seen.” So many other shows, including Cummings’ 2 Broke Girls, follow the lives of at least relatively affluent characters in New York City. Roseanne, which originally ran from 1988-1997, focused on a working-class family in Illinois.
“I’m not saying that’s why people voted the way they did, but they did and they weren’t being represented on television,” Cummings said, after noting that Hillary Clinton’s “deplorables” comment echoed the disconnect between Hollywood elites and much of their American audience.
“The opportunity to get content with a message into red states was very appealing to all of us,” she continued. “Because a lot of stuff that we make, only our echo chamber sees. We’re so delusional about who watches what we make and a lot of times we’re in our echo chamber and we sort of forget that there’s a ton of people who are not watching and we’re preaching to the choir.”
The U.S. needs more shows like Roseanne, where the lives of everyday Americans are reflected on-screen. Cummings adds that she even had to fight to bring realism to the show, reminding writers that characters would not say “undocumented immigrants” in their own home.
“In the privacy of his kitchen, with his wife, sixtysomething years old, [John Goodman’s character Dan] probably would not say ‘undocumented workers,’” she said. “But ‘illegals’ is not the PC term. It’s a tough one. And people got angry on the crew.”
She added that they had to “get it right so we know how the characters get it wrong.”
In the fall after the Barr tweet, ABC released The Connors, a show that was Roseanne without Roseanne, who had unceremoniously died before the pilot episode. The New York Times called The Connors “unsettling and raw and fitfully funny.”
It’s not Roseanne, but it doesn’t need to be. Without the star who played a Republican on screen and in her free time posed as Hitler for a photo shoot and tweeted out a couple’s home address, it can distance itself from the right-wing caricature Barr represented.
The Connors still offers something most other shows don’t, and without the baggage of Barr, its appeal is so much better.
