The biggest loser in the entire “Roseanne” uproar isn’t Roseanne Barr herself, the cast or crew of the resurrected and immensely popular sitcom, or even the target of Barr’s awful tweet, former Obama advisor Valerie Jarrett. It’s the “Roseanne” audience here in Middle America.
Of course, it’s abhorrent what Barr typed about Jarrett early last week (“Muslim brotherhood & planet of the apes had a baby=vj.”) in the middle of a late night multi-tweet-riff that mocked various members of the previous presidential administration. Why comparing an African-American woman to an ape is unacceptable and racist should be obvious to everyone. Barr herself pleaded to her fans afterwards to not attempt to defend her tweet.
She screwed up big time, she knew it, and her mistake led to her show’s cancellation, which led to her fellow cast-members and crew all of the sudden having their schedules cleared for the coming TV season. Laurie Metcalf, John Goodman, and Sara Gilbert have never been wanting for work in Hollywood; they will be fine. The less famous and newer cast members and writers just worked on the #1 show on television this past season and will be fine. Barr has earned a fortune from her lifetime of ground-breaking comedy and will ultimately be fine. The target of the joke has been profusely apologized to, and while I won’t pretend to know how deeply offensive that insult is to her or any black American, my hunch is that Jarrett will ultimately be okay as well. This isn’t rape or murder or even sexual assault we’re talking about here. (That people are putting Roseanne Barr in the same category now as Bill Cosby is ridiculously stupid at the least and insanely offensive to sexual assault victims at the worst.)
And yes, the rest of us will all be fine in the grand scheme of things as well. Again, this isn’t life or death stuff, it’s entertainment. Barr made a really, really bad joke at one person’s expense, but it was a “joke” nonetheless. She’s not the first entertainer to put her foot in her mouth (ahem, Samantha Bee, Kathy Griffin, etc.) and certainly won’t be the last.
That all being said, the biggest losers in this whole saga are the tens of millions of us here in Rust Belt/Farm Belt/Non-Big City America who religiously watched her show in droves and who now look elsewhere for mainstream entertainment that doesn’t mock us, talk down to us, or non-ironically refer to us as “Flyover Country.” The pickings are slim.
ABC’s outstanding “The Middle,” starring a rare right-of-center Hollywood celebrity Patricia Heaton, just finished its final season, so that’s gone. The extremely blue (and extremely brilliant) South Park isn’t liberal, but they only release 10 precious episodes a year these days, and the foul-mouthed kids from Colorado are not exactly everyone’s cup of tea. Late-night TV or anything at all on Comedy Central? It’s anti-Trump, day in, day out, all night, every night.
The last man standing seems to be Tim Allen’s “Last Man Standing,” which features a likable conservative protagonist and had great ratings, but was inexplicably canceled by ABC in 2017. Fox smartly picked it up, but new seasons of that won’t come out until 2019.
What should be obvious now is that there’s a massive vacuum in the mainstream entertainment world for non-Leftist comedy, and the audience for such entertainment is huge. This audience lives in places like Lanford, the Connors’ fictitious small-town in Illinois. There are thousands of Lanfords in America (I proudly live in one of them here in Rochelle, Ill.).
Together, we add up to tens of millions of people. We love our country; we don’t hate the president; we are a open-minded, diverse, loving, and welcoming people. Many of us (but not all) vote Republican. Many of us (but not all) have nuclear families and go to church. Many of us (but not all) spend very little time obsessing about race and identity politics and social justice stuff. Many of us (but not all) spend the vast majority of our time working hard and raising our families. When we want to improve our communities, we look first to each other, not necessarily to the government. And when we want to wind down, we watch a lot of sports and a lot of TV.
On top of all of that, the vast majority of us we are proud of where we live.
We’re primed to be entertained by mainstream shows that not just appreciate and understand our perspective, but actually come from our perspective, like the Connor family did.
Any takers?
Michael Koolidge lives in Rochelle, Ill., and hosts the regionally syndicated daily radio program The Michael Koolidge Show heard on 14 separate radio signals in the Midwest.
