Roseanne Barr's Roseanne reboot was canceled in 2018 because of erratic behavior and racist comments she made on Twitter. That's a well known and indisputable fact.
But Barr, even all these years later, sees it differently.
Five years later, Barr is blaming her costar Sara Gilbert, who played Darlene Conner on the franchise, for the show's cancellation.
During a recent appearance on Megyn Kelly's SiriusXM podcast The Megyn Kelly Show, Barr claimed that it wasn't her racist comments that got the show canceled but rather Gilbert's reaction thereto that did the trick.
See her interview with Kelly below.
Barr had made several shocking and offensive comments in 2018 during the Roseanne reboot's run, including several in support of former Republican President Donald Trump.
Others were laced with anti-semitic conspiracy theories about billionaire Democratic donor George Soros, a favorite bogeyman of right-wing crackpots.
But the straw that broke the camel's back was a series of tweets in which Barr referred to Valerie Jarrett, a senior advisor to former Democratic President Barack Obama, as being what happens when the “muslim brotherhood & planet of the apes had a baby.” Barr later claimed she thought Jarrett, a Black woman, was white.
Gilbert, the executive producer of the reboot, tweeted at the time calling Barr's comments "abhorrent" and saying she was "disappointed...to say the least" in Barr's conduct. Barr told Kelly it was Gilbert's tweet that got Roseanne canceled.
Barr told Kelly:
"She repeatedly twisted it. It was her tweet that canceled the show...
She went on to claim:
“I called [Gilbert] up and I said, just like this, ‘You better shut your blanking mouth about me. I’m telling you, you better shut your effing mouth.' And then she did. But you know, my voice can be very scary."
If that story is true, it had very little impact--Barr went on to sign away her rights to Roseanne, which was subsequently spun-off by Gilbert and co-EP Tom Werner into The Conners, a version of the show in which Barr's character had been killed off.
The decision clearly still irks Barr, who told Kelly:
"I was just floored. And you know, but she ends up owning my work and Tom Werner becomes her partner in owning my work.”
On Twitter, many people had very little sympathy for Barr.
Barr also told Kelly she thought the decision to kill her character off was a message from Gilbert et. al. that they wanted her to kill herself.
“I thought they were sending a message over the airwaves because they knew I had mental health issues. I thought they wanted me to kill myself. And all my friends did too."
Anyway, The Conners has been renewed for a sixth season, which will premiere this fall.
