Do I Have to Write about Roseanne Barr?

The answer, of course, is "no", but that doesn't mean there isn't something to say about it.  But I don't, you know, have to write about her.

We'll start with the obligatory preface.  Roseanne Barr is not one of my favorite people on earth, as I wrote a few weeks back.  Profanity makes me cringe, people who choose to act like low-lifes make me cringe, and people who sing the National Anthem and grab their crotchular area thereafter, claiming to be "everyman" make me cringe.

Those are a lot of the reasons that I did not watch her original TV show even once when it was first on.  I didn't have to, and I certainly didn't want to.  Roseanne Barr would not have been on my radar screen for the rest of her, or my, life had there not been a reboot of that show, and had it not gotten so much publicity.

Plus, there are DVRs now and you don't have to arrange your schedule around a network show anymore.  So if you record something and don't like it, you don't have to watch the rest of it, you can just change to something else you recorded.

So I watched the rebooted Roseanne show because it was going to get talked about, the only surviving sitcom with an actual supporter of President Trump as a protagonist.  OK, I thought, I'll record it and see if I liked it.  And it was OK, although I had to ask my best girl who some of the characters actually were every once in a while.  It wasn't a laugh-a-second comedy like "Big Bang Theory", but I would continue to watch it if it stayed on the air.

As we know, it won't.  Miss Barr decided to go off the deep end, and in what she referred to as an Ambien-influenced wee-hours rant, tweeted a reference to Valerie Jarrett, the Obama whisperer, as what you would get "if the Muslim Brotherhood and Planet of the Apes had a child."  I suppose that the latter was the reference that was problematic, because if you refer to someone who is even part black with a simian reference, you're going to lose your TV show.

And she did ... so she did.

   Note -- the Ambien people put out a snarky comment about how
   "racism" was not one of the side effects of Ambien.  Unfortunately, 
   that got people looking at what the actual side effects of Ambien 
   were, and those are not pretty.  They should have just shut up.

I put all the prefaces in because I really don't think I'll miss the show particularly, I certainly won't miss seeing Roseanne Barr in the news, and I'm 100% sure I'll find something else to watch in its place.  The 150 or so people who lost their jobs when ABC cancelled the show, well, it is very sad for them (and probably for Miss Barr for costing them their livelihoods), but Hollywood cancels shows all the time, and people lose their jobs there all the time.

ABC probably feels like it was pushed into putting the show on in the first place; God forbid they have a show with a Trump supporter as a protagonist, but Roseanne had at least some power and influence and got it done.  The ratings were huge, and ABC was really on the horns of a dilemma.  Unfortunately, Roseanne made it easy for them to cancel the show, even though it cost them their ratings leader.

But ABC is on a different set of dilemma horns now.

They have now set a standard for cancelling a show that relates to tweets.  "Tweet this, and we will cancel your show, even if it is a ratings leader."  It is a fait accompli after the Roseanne action.  So what happens when some other lead actor on an ABC show tweets something about someone who is even less anti-American than Valerie Jarrett?

So I'm not going to do this myself, but someone should, and here goes.  There are plenty of performers in lead positions on shows at ABC.  Most of them, or all of them, tweet.  It is time for some research firm to go through every single solitary tweet that every ABC star has written for the past five years.  Let us set them against the standard that ABC has now set up, by cancelling the ratings-leading show because an actor on it tweeted something offensive about someone.

Stephen Colbert is on CBS, for example, but he made an obscene reference to President Trump on his show -- not even a tweet -- relative to Vladimir Putin.  Had the show been on ABC, would he have been summarily canned?  CBS clearly does not have the same standards for keeping people on the air that ABC does, but what is going to be the standard for ABC going forward?

I do encourage the readers of this column, including the Russians (you are good at that, da?) to go back and review all the tweets of every major performer on an ABC show.  I have a feeling that someone will do that, very soon.

And then what, we ask, will ABC do?

Copyright 2018 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here?  There's a new post from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com at 10am Eastern time, every weekday, giving new meaning to "prolific essayist."  Appearance, advertising, sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton