I have really tried hard not to delve into the Roseanne Barr controversy that happened on May 29th of this year, alas maybe now, that the storm has calmed down a bit, I could chime in on this.
To briefly recap, earlier this year “Roseanne” was revived by ABC for a tenth season and premiered to incredible ratings, but the show was ultimately canceled after Rosseanne tweeted about former White House advisor Valerie Jarrett's physical features by comparing her face to a breed of “Muslim Brotherhood and ‘Planet of the Apes” having a baby. Of course, any comparison of a fairly dark-skinned personality to an ape will cause uproar, as it should, and ABC cancelled “Roseanne” just hours after the tweet.
Barr's target, Valerie Jarett, is described on Wikipedia, not that it should matter, as having both her parents of "European and African-American descent. On the television series Finding Your Roots." DNA testing indicated that Jarrett was of 49% European, 46% African, and 5% Native American descent. Her great grandparents were Jewish, like Barr.
Do I think Barr had serious and racist intentions with her tweet? No, but it sure came out wrong and she should have, of course, never tweeted those words. Ever since her firing, Barr has strayed far away from the spotlight and barely commented on her firing. Althought she still tweets a hell of a whole lot as she's become a sort of folk hero for conservatives.
ABC is reviving the show, without Barr, as a spinoff titled “The Conners,” which seems like an odd thing to do as Barr was the driving force behind that show with her brash mouth and antics. The spinoff is set to launch in the fall on ABC, but what to make of the elephant in the room, the fact that the star of the show for 10 seasons is no onger there, how will the creators of the show deal with that?
John Goodman, who starred opposite Barr as her husband Dan Conner, confirmed that Roseanne's character will be killed off in "The Connors." Speaking to The Sunday Times, Goodman said his character will be “mopey and sad because his wife’s dead” and then revealed how those emotions translated into his own life after Barr was ditched from the show:
“I was broken-hearted, but I thought, ‘OK, it’s just show business, I’m going to let it go,'” Goodman said. “But I went through a period, about a month, where I was very depressed. I’m a depressive anyway, so any excuse that I can get to lower myself, I will. But that had a great deal to do with it, more than I wanted to admit.”
Goodman maintains that Barr is “not a racist” and seems to be indicating, in the Times interview, that he doesn't agree with the ABC response in the firing of his good friend.