It would be completely reasonable if Roseanne Barr, 73, packed it up and retired. But she feels she has one more show in her — even if she has to pay for it herself. The question remains whether anyone will buy it.
At her peak, she was the most powerful woman in television. Her “domestic goddess” standup character became a favorite of Johnny Carson’s. She eventually earned $1 million per episode on her ground-breaking sitcom Roseanne, a ratings juggernaut for ABC in its original run from 1988 to 1997.
Controversy was never very far from Barr, who has been open about her own mental health issues and defiantly outspoken about her politics, which have grown increasingly right wing and conspiratorial.
But nothing came close to 2018, the year ABC abruptly canceled a highly rated Roseanne reboot after Barr published an offensive tweet about former Barack Obama advisor Valerie Jarrett, who is half-Black, saying she looked as if “muslim brotherhood & planet of the apes had a baby.” The show was retooled as The Conners, killing Barr’s character off via a drug overdose, and aired for seven seasons. Eight years later, Barr maintains the tweet wasn’t racist and that she was criticizing Jarrett for being sympathetic to the Iranian regime.
Shunned by Hollywood, Barr is now going the indie route, with a self-financed single-camera sitcom called Meemaw: A Modern Day Fable. In the show, based loosely on her life in Texas Hill Country, she plays the matriarch of a mixed-race family (Drea de Matteo plays her daughter, Omar Gooding plays her son-in-law) who runs afoul of the law trying to raise funds for her granddaughter’s bat mitzvah. Randy Quaid is also in the mix as a local sheriff.
The Hollywood Reporter got a sneak peek of Meemaw, which sees Barr running amok in thrift store furs at rooster fights — closer in tone to trailer park comedy like My Name is Earl than the three-camera repartee of Roseanne.
Barr called THR for a wide-ranging conversation about her career, her cancellation, and her hopes of a comeback.
What’s Meemaw: A Modern Day Fable about?
It’s about a patriotic grandmother who is the matriarch of a mixed-race prepper family in Texas.
What are the races?
Black and white. Her son-in-law is Black and her daughter is Jewish and Cuban.
What’s a prepper?
Somebody who’s prepared for the end of the world.
Is that based on your own life?
Yeah. I’m a prepper. I live in Texas. Everybody’s a prepper here.
I heard there’s a bat mitzvah involved in the plot?
She knows that she’s got to give her granddaughter a bat mitzvah because that’s part of their Jewish culture. So one day she gets a message from the good Lord that she’s got to take things into her own hands if she wants to be able to afford the greatest bat mitzvah that’s ever been in Bovine, Texas.
Which probably wouldn’t be that expensive.
And she uses everything at her command, which is her multi-religious prayer group, and her formerly dormant sexuality.
It’s no longer dormant? Who’s she sleeping with?
Well, you have to watch. But Randy Quaid does play my romantic interest.
This isn’t filmed in front of a live studio audience like Roseanne was?
No, it is not. I haven’t really showed it to anybody yet. But it is so funny. It’s the funniest shit I’ve ever done, and I had a ball and I play a really wacky old lady this time.
Randy Quaid is pretty wacky on social media. What’s he like on set?
I’m in love with him and I wish he would leave his wife and marry me. I enjoyed making out with him so much that I wrote extra scenes where we would make out.
What’s the plan now with the show? Where can we see it?
Anybody who wants a number one show and is smart enough to take a number one show. I don’t know why they don’t want a number one show and why they hate a number one show and why they would destroy a number one show. But if they do want a number one show, I got it.
How did you pay for this? Did you pay out of pocket?
I whored my ass up and down Hollywood Boulevard. [It was actually a co-production between Barr and Just the News founder John Solomon, who split production costs evenly.]
You mentioned reaching out to Elon Musk about this project.
I don’t know why he hasn’t called me or returned my calls. I mean, of all people on earth, I’m the one he should call, but I don’t know.
You used a union crew?
Oh, hell, honey, I’m always about the union and wages for the American workers. Hell yeah. I never changed on that. That’s why I’m no longer a Democrat.
Let’s go back to when Roseanne returned to ABC in 2018. It premiered to 18 million people.
No, it did not. Bitch, it did not, bitch. It premiered to 28 million people.
Sorry, I was talking same-day viewing. The audience did grow substantially when you factored in delayed viewing.
You better update your files, Mr. Man.
Honestly, I’m happy I got it wrong just to hear you call me bitch.
Oh my God. I haven’t even had my morning cocktail yet. I’m twitchy.
Did those ratings make you feel vindicated about your appeal to mainstream audiences?
I didn’t think of it that way. I thought of it like, “Oh my God, the American people are wanting to see something that talks to them again.” I lined up with the, what do they call it? The zeitgeist. I mined the zeitgeist again. I knew I hadn’t lost my connection to people’s hearts.
I was so excited to go back and say something new that hadn’t been said about the working people of the backbone of this country. And they didn’t like it, ever, the people at the network, and they tried to derail me. I see that now. They tried to derail me every step of the way. Meemaw is everything that they would not allow me to do.
It sounds like this show is letting you heal from a lot of the pain of what happened with the Roseanne reboot.
Absolutely. And a lot of the healing happens through my scenes with Omar Gooding, who plays my son-in-law. He’s also a standup comic and he’s a Black man. I met a lot of resistance casting Black actors.
You mean Black actors didn’t want to audition for you?
We had a lot of really great Black comedians audition for the role. A lot of people said no, they wouldn’t. “How could any Black person work with me?” That hurt me.
Let’s talk about the Valerie Jarrett tweet that got you fired. You’ve maintained that you didn’t know she was Black. Can you explain?
It was not a racist tweet. It wasn’t about race, it was about politics. What it really was was a three-month conversation between myself and journalists in Iran who were talking about attacks mostly on Iranian women in the streets.
And what I meant was the Muslim Brotherhood, of which Valerie Jarrett is part. [Barr offers no evidence for this allegation.] Planet of the Apes is my favorite movie. [Screenwriter] Rod Serling said it was an analogy for what the Nazis did to the Jews. I always called the government in Iran Planet of the Apes, because that is exactly what they do. In the movie Planet of the Apes, a militarized police force arrests human beings for speaking and reading, and that is exactly what they did to the women of Iran. That is a movie about fascism, it is not a movie about Black people.
You said something happened before the tweet that made you feel you’d lost control of the show. What was it?
I called the head writer and said, “When are we getting back together to outline season 2?” Because I was pretty much the ceremonial head writer, right? It was my show, and I outlined and went over every script in the writers’ room that season. And the guy says to me, “Oh, the writers are already back.” I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I said, “How long have they been back?” “Oh, at least a month. But all the writers, they really want you to drop by.” These are the words that hit me so hard. It was like getting hit with a board. I knew at that moment, “Oh my God, they have taken my show. I gave them a number one show, they have taken it away from me.”
What was [producer] Tom Werner‘s role in this?
Seems like [he was behind it].
Why had you clashed with him during the original run of Roseanne?
Because he was trying to steal my show. He tried to fire me off my own show and steal it from me then. Man, it goes deep, man. So I had a couple beers, take Ambien, go to bed, have my computer in bed with me, which I always do because I can’t sleep. I wake up and that’s where my brain’s at. They’ve taken my show. I was feeling sorry for myself. Christ, this is the reward I get for giving them a number one show, that they take it from me. (Werner did not respond to a request for comment.)
How did you learn you were fired?
At 8:00 a.m., my boyfriend goes, “Hey, ABC’s on the phone.” And I go, “Why?” He goes, “Because you tweeted something.” And I said, “I deleted that.” He goes, “Well, they’ve got it and they’re saying it’s racist.” And I said, quote, and everyone in the house heard me, I said, “Muslim is not a race.” And my boyfriend says, “No, they say she’s Black.” And I’m like, “Oh, fuck. What?”
And so I called ABC back and they put me through, and it was Ben Sherwood. And first thing he says to me is, “What possible excuse can you have for the egregious thing you have done?”
And so I just swallow hard and I go, “Well, I thought she was white.”
And I just knew. So I go, “Don’t cancel my show. You’re not going to cancel my show, are you?” I go, “I will do anything. I will go on any of your news shows. Let me explain. Let me explain what I meant. Let me apologize.”
And he says to me, “Well, we’ll just have to wait and see how the community handles this.”
I remember it being almost immediate that somebody sends me Wanda Sykes’ tweet saying, “I have to get off of this show. Roseanne’s a racist.” But she was already off the show, because she had been complaining that the show was “humanizing Trumpers.”
Then Sara Gilbert goes, “I am so embarrassed by another cast member.” Such an insult from the person who wrote her lines in all those years and made her the executive producer so she could “protect me.” And those two tweets, once they were public, the next step was the show’s canceled.
What was involved in The Conners continuing? What did you have to do to allow that to happen?
ABC demanded that they would only make [the show] if I were not [in it]. And they called me and said, “You have a choice to make: You can sign off on letting us do a show without you [or everyone is out of a job.]”
The only thing that mattered to me at the time is I said, “I want you to say I’m not a racist and that you know I’m not a racist and that my whole life has been about fighting racism and that you know it.”
And [Werner] said, “I will do that once you sign away your rights. And also I promise you, if you sign away your rights for this season, that we’ll make sure that everybody knows you did it to save the jobs of the crew.”
The Conners ran for seven seasons. You didn’t get paid for the subsequent ones?
Nope. It was all a trick.
Did you have any say in how they wrote you off?
They decided to kill me with opioids because in the first episode of that, Dan and Roseanne are kind of making a drug deal. I really wanted to talk about the opioid crisis in our country. So they killed me with an opioid overdose. Wow, I’m really grateful that they didn’t have me robbing an orphanage or raping some kids. That was a nice way to kill America’s mom. Drug overdose.
It was all insulting on so many fucking levels, not ever even considering what that character meant to people who still come up to me on the streets and say, “You were my mom.”
How do you get along with your former castmates, John Goodman and Laurie Metcalf?
I don’t.
You’re not in contact with them at all?
Of course not.
That’s kind of sad. I assumed you guys were like a family.
I did too.
And then this whole thing bubbled up recently with Michael Fishman, which was very hard to watch. [Fishman said Roseanne was “rightfully canceled,” while Barr shot back, calling her TV son “a little worm.”]
Nobody is more brokenhearted than me. I just choose to remember the fun and the good times. My son called Goodman and asked him to do a cameo on Meemaw and he declined.
Chuck Lorre put out a memoir and said he was made to write scripts for Roseanne that were credited to Tom Arnold. Tom came out swinging in response. Who’s telling the truth?
Unbelievably — I don’t think you’ll hear me say this often — but Tom Arnold is telling the truth for once. Talk about the paradigm switch here. Tom Arnold is defending me. I have to thank him for that. That’s the first time he’s done something right by me in his fucking life. Thanks, Tom.
Can I ask how much you were making at the height of Roseanne? I read somewhere it was like $20 million a season.
I made $1 million an episode.
Like Friends, Charlie Sheen-level money.
No, I made a million way before them all in the ’90s.
What happened to all that money?
I still got quite a bit of it. The rest of it, I had some divorces and some legal problems and I had some people help themselves to a lot of it.
How much do you have left?
I got a lot left. I ain’t hurting for money.
Let’s end with something a little fun. A speed round of some of your most memorable chapters. Your performance of the national anthem in 1990.
Yeah, I didn’t sing so good. I call that a tragic singing accident. I had gone on Johnny Carson the night before and told him I was going to do it, and Johnny says to me, “Whatever you do, don’t start too high.” He goes, “Bob Goulet started too high and it was a disaster.” I had practiced it so many thousands of times, but I didn’t know that much about singing. About five notes in I thought, fuck it, I’ll just try to make it funny. Bad, bad, bad, bad idea.
I mean, you’re obviously not a singer. Why would they even ask you in the first place?
Because Tom Werner owned the Padres and it was working woman’s night and him and Tom Arnold, friendly they became, and said, “Oh, Roseanne would be the perfect person to sing it.”
Do you have any memories of making She-Devil with Meryl Streep?
I really loved acting. And I loved the Teamsters. I didn’t get any scenes with Meryl. And we both complained to the director. We had one brief scene, but me and Meryl were like, the posters were showing us fighting and we’re like, “We want to get in a girl fight!” I said, “I want to fucking pull Meryl Streep’s hair and smash her fucking face in the dirt! Come on, let me do it!” And they wouldn’t. She wanted to beat the shit out of me, too. We thought it’d be funnier than hell.
You won the Emmy for best actress in 1993. Do you remember that night?
I didn’t go.
Why not?
I was having a nervous breakdown.
You used to run around with Sandra Bernhard and Madonna, didn’t you?
Yeah, a little bit. The best person that I ran around with was Lisa Marie Presley.
Did she ever talk to you about Michael Jackson?
Yeah. She said he was the best lay she ever had.
You’re lying.
No, I’m not. She said he was the best lay and he had it going on. She said he told her all the things girls want to hear.
And you believed her?
Yeah. She never lied about shit like that. She told me about Nicolas Cage and his business. She told me everybody she was with and their business, the size of it and the use and all of it.
And Michael was up there?
He was number one.
Can we end it there?
(Laughs.) Yeah.
