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eichy815 · 6 years

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Roseanne Conner Has Been Permanently Foreclosed!

It’s been barely one week since actress/comedienne Roseanne Barr ended decades’ worth of comedic goodwill from her “Domestic Goddess” alter ego...all with one fatal tweet.

And, almost four years after Bill Cosby saw his comedy empire fall – once the floodgates had burst open regarding his past history as a sexual predator – a sad parallel can be drawn. I would refer people back to my November 2014 op-ed piece entitled “Dr. Huxtable Has Left the Building...”

To be clear: there are pointed differences between the respective downfalls of both Barr and Cosby. The latter had managed to keep his sex crimes hush/hush for several decades before his depravity caught up with him...a harbinger of karmic justice for sexual abuse survivors, more than three years before the #MeToo movement arose.

Barr, by contrast, had a history of crude and unflattering public behavior...but nothing, in and of itself, that would ever turn her into a universal pariah. Her pattern of racist statements didn’t begin until the Obama presidency (coinciding with her own forays into political campaigns...including her 2012 long-shot presidential bid on the Peace & Freedom Party ticket).

What finally did her in: following the successful revival of her classic sitcom (for a de facto tenth season) this past spring, Barr pressed her luck one too many times. In a May 29 racist slur made by Barr on Twitter, she compared former Obama White House public engagement liaison Valerie Jarrett to an ape:

Muslim brotherhood & planet of the apes had a baby=vj.

Within a day, ABC Entertainment President Channing Dungey officially pulled the plug on the revival’s much-anticipated fall return (which would have been its eleventh season, technically). Fittingly, Dungey is the first black woman to head a major broadcast network.

Amid a bizarre flurry of alternately apologizing for – and then doubling down on – her hate speech over the next few days, Barr lashed out at a variety of addition public figures, including Chelsea Clinton, George Soros, and a handful of her former costars. Barr was promptly dropped by her talent agency, ICM Partners.

Predictably, Fox News and legions of Barr’s conservative followers (due to the actress’s – and her character’s – full-throated support of Donald Trump) took to the airwaves, excoriating ABC (and the so-called “liberal media”) for censoring Barr and trampling on her First Amendment rights. What they fail to acknowledge is that the First Amendment doesn’t allow for anybody to say anything they want, whenever they want, with absolutely no repercussions.

First, let’s dispose of the faux-outrage from the Far Right by establishing why Barr’s tweet was unequivocally racist. As The Washington Post’s Arica L. Coleman chronicles, European colonists who enslaved Africans openly viewed and maligned people of color as “lustful” creatures by likening them to the primates that inhabited continental Africa. This has been used as a basis for dehumanizing the worth and personhood of black people in the United States for centuries.

So for Barr to compare Jarrett to a simian – that digs straight to the heart of the systemic, cultural, and social forms of racism that have plagued black Americans for generations. It’s much different than, say, liberal citizens who’ve joked that George W. Bush looked like a monkey – due to how there has never been any albino species of primate ever linked to a historical institution of oppression. The only “white ape” from America’s history is the mythical legend of one found within the Tarzan franchise.

That being said, ABC should have realized it was taking a risk when it first signed Roseanne Barr for her sitcom’s revival last year. The May 29 tweet against Jarrett was nothing new for the fallen star; Barr had a recorded history of making such racist statements in recent years.

Furthermore, it should have been a warning sign when taking into account how Barr had endorsed Bernie Sanders (a self-described “Democratic socialist”) during the 2016 primaries – but then turned right around and endorsed Donald Trump (a demented fairweather conservative and avowed corporatist). In terms of ideology and decorum, Sanders and Trump are oceans apart. The fact that Barr jumped from Sanders to Trump should have been a red flag that she was still unstable (notwithstanding her own volatile public image throughout the 1990s).

This reminds me of the whole Duck Dynasty flap from late-2013. Remember? – A&E infamously fired the reality show’s patriarch, Phil Robertson, after he’d made anti-gay statements in a GQ interview that year. When Duck Dynasty fans (and the entire Robertson family itself) threatened to pull out and retaliate, A&E backpedaled and reinstated him.

I addressed this in my January 2014 op-ed entitled “What the Duck, America...?!?!” Phil Robertson had delivered his anti-LGBT speech in a manner that was devoid of slurs, so it was easier for him (and his supporters) to throw a tantrum and get him his job back. Roseanne Barr, by contrast, explicitly chose a racial slur that was so blatant and overt that there was no coming back from it. If Robertson had openly used a term like “cocksuckers” or “faggots” during his interview, I suspect his termination would have stuck – he would have become the pariah back in 2014 that Barr has become this summer.

Nor does ABC itself have clean hands. While ABC/Disney CEO Bob Iger has condemned Barr after justifying her very public firing by saying:

There was only one thing to do here, and that was the right thing.

...yet, Iger himself has an abominable personal record of cherrypicking his perception of “acceptable” hateful sentiments toward minority groups. With cognitively-dissonant tactlessness, Iger outwardly pays lip service to people of color and women...but, on the other hand, he is totally willing to throw LGBT people and non-Christians under the bus, as I’d profiled in my op-ed from this past March entitled “Political Indirectness.”

And on top of that: ABC is *still* trying to milk revenue out of Roseanne itself by reportedly exploring the possibility of creating a Darlene spinoff starring Sara Gilbert, who played the Conners’ rebellious middle child. They are obviously thinking they can channel the success of The Hogan Family after Valerie Harper exited her self-titled sitcom back in the 1980s.

Roseanne, however, just won’t work that way. Harper had only done Valerie for a season-and-a-half before she was pink-slipped due to demanding a pay raise. Roseanne now has a full decade worth of content and history behind it. Also, Sara Gilbert is still needed as a sane and reasonable voice to balance out the toxic neofeminism (from some of her fellow cohosts) on her current CBS daytime gabfest, The Talk (even though The Talk and Roseanne do have their respective studios on the same backlot).

I understand the desire to keep the 200+ cast/crew members employed in the wake of Barr’s racist meltdown. But ABC could still make a concerted effort to find all of them new jobs on other ABC Studios (or ancillary) productions. I seriously doubt that any casting director or showrunner will hold it against any of Barr’s castmates or the below-the-line crew via some stigma of “guilt-by-association.” If anything, other series would have nothing but sympathy for any Roseanne refugees who want to get back to work.

The final piece of irony in all of this is exactly how far Barr herself has fallen. In her sitcom’s original inception, she portrayed Roseanne Conner, a blue-collar suburban Illinois worker and mother whose dysfunctional lower middle-class family was unlike any clan ever portrayed before on an American primetime comedy. Her TV husband, John Goodman’s lovable-but-equally-assertive Dan, balanced her out with fantastic chemistry.

As Roseanne and Dan grappled with living from paycheck to paycheck – hopping from one crummy and thankless job to the next – they had their hands full raising their three children: oldest daughter, Becky (Lecy Goranson), a brainy overachiever with a sharp tongue; middle daughter, Darlene (Gilbert), a bratty tomboy with even more classic retorts than Becky; and youngest son, D.J. (Michael Fishman), a rambunctious mischief-maker who was clearly Mama Conner’s favorite.

Americans dealt with the recession of the early-1990s, and, likewise, the Conners’ own fortunes ebbed-and-flowed. Dan – originally a drywell contractor – went into business for himself as a bike shop owner...but his establishment folded after two years. Roseanne, meanwhile, floated from factory worker to beauty salon sweeper to restaurant server to finally opening her own successful restaurant in 1992 (shortly after Dan’s bike shop went belly up). Since, when the show returned for Season 10 this past spring, Roseanne Conner was now a disabled Uber driver, it can only be assumed that The Lunch Box (her and Jackie’s loose meat sandwich diner) must have gone belly up at some point (probably during The Great Recession).

Always present during the show’s original run was the terrific Laurie Metcalf as Roseanne’s hapless pushover of a younger sister, Jackie. Becky and Darlene began dating (and, eventually, each married) a set of brothers: bad boy Mark (the late Glenn Quinn) and introverted David (Johnny Galecki, who has now skyrocketed to success as Leonard on The Big Bang Theory). D.J.’s character was also fleshed out, as the years went on.

The Conners were always crass, outspoken, and constantly fighting an uphill battle of remaining just above the poverty line. So many Americans related to them because a lot of our own struggles were their struggles. Offscreen, Barr battled for creative control with a turntable of showrunners – but ultimately, she secured the top decision-making power and vaulted her sitcom to #1 in the Nielsens.

When I talk about “the irony” of Barr’s present-day fall, I’m referring to its fluctuating content. Seasons 4 and 5 were the strongest of Roseanne, in my humble opinion – and the ratings reflected that popular sentiment (in fact, many of the fans even prefer the sitcom’s earliest three seasons; I actually view Seasons 1 through 3 as having many significant weak spots, in hindsight). But then, around Season 6 (coinciding with Barr’s highly-publicized divorce from actor Tom Arnold), Roseanne’s quality began to take a nosedive.

The Roseanne Conner character had always made strong statements against the patriarchy while opposing male domination in her daily life. But she had always done it in an endearing, authentic way. By 1993, her lead character suddenly shifted from being lovably-sarcastic and sympathetically-cantankerous to just being outright mean. Her misandry (i.e. contempt for males) became pronounced and gratuitous in virtually every episode. Dan’s character became wildly uneven – oscillating between charismatic assertiveness, psychotic temperamental escapades, and the meekness of a stereotypically-“whipped” husband.

There was no longer any consistency to Roseanne and Dan’s marital interactions. Every episode eventually became written to essentially boost Barr’s ego...rather than organically developing the characters or advancing their storylines.

It’s ironic, when you think about it, seeing how one of Roseanne’s most critically-acclaimed episodes aired in Season 7 and dealt with D.J. being afraid to kiss Geena, his black female classmate, in a school play. Upon returning after two decades off the air, in the Season 10 revival it’s revealed that D.J. actually went on to marry Geena herself...and they have a daughter named Mary (presumably named after Nana Mary, played by the late Shelley Winters) together. And Roseanne Conner absolutely adores her youngest new granddaughter. Just more bittersweet poetic irony...

Still, ABC remained mum – and reaped the advertising revenue from Roseanne Conner’s new persona of toxic misandry. It was a #1 show, after all. Even when it gradually began bleeding viewers over the course of Seasons 6 through 9, it still delivered solid ratings. This was likely a consequence of nostalgia, viewer loyalty, and women in the viewing audience who’d latched onto a lead female character who (usually) didn’t take crap from anybody. Hell, when Goranson left the show during its fifth season, Roseanne got away with recasting the role of Becky (introducing audiences to Sarah Chalke, later of Scrubs fame). When Barr got pregnant in real-life, the birth of the Conners’ fourth child – their son, Jerry – was written into the series.

But for all of those years, ABC never complained...because male-bashing has been fairly “fashionable” within mainstream culture for the past few decades. It took Barr making a reprehensible and indefensible racial slur for her to finally be put in her place.

Another reason why I’m skeptical of a Darlene spinoff: the Season 10 finale (apparently, the de facto series finale), which aired on May 22 (less than two weeks ago!), actually wrapped up the show quite nicely. The Conners’ basement flooded, and it looked as though they were about to lose everything. Then, a state of emergency was declared – empowering the Conners through an allocation of FEMA dollars that not only allowed them to repair their house but also provided enough money for Roseanne Conner to have her badly-needed knee surgery. The final scene is of the extended Conner family ready to pig out on Roseanne’s favorite foods the night before her surgery takes place.

This would be a fitting spot to end the series for good. It was certainly superior to the much-maligned “Lottery Season” (Season 9) that ended the show’s original run, which was revealed to be part of a fictitious short novel that Roseanne Conner had written.

When the Roseanne revival (Season 10) was first announced back in April of last year, I had my own extensive wish-list for it. By and large, I think they did an excellent job (particularly memorable was the scene where “Grammy Rose” proceeded to “waterboard” mouthy granddaughter Harris – portrayed by newcomer Emma Kenney – in the kitchen sink). I was looking forward to Season 11. It’s beyond disgusting how Barr couldn’t learn how to hold her tongue and enjoy a generation of newfound success.

Still, while I find the ABC cancellation to be justified, I do think it’s an overreaction for networks such as CMT, The Paramount Network, TV Land, and Hulu to yank Roseanne’s syndicated reruns. I thought the exact same thing when all syndicated episodes of The Cosby Show were unceremoniously pulled back in 2014 and 2015. If the syndication revenue falls due to viewer backlash, *THEN* rescinding the syndicated runs makes sense. But let us enjoy all the happy memories we have of Roseanne. And let the cast enjoy the money from any residuals if there is indeed an audience left for the old episodes. And yes, I still have the exact same sentiments about The Cosby Show.

To be clear, there have been much different circumstances and contexts surrounding the deletion of both Roseanne and The Cosby Show from the airwaves. But the former “Domestic Goddess” deserves nothing but scorn for torpedoing her own career after a downslide that has been a protracted slow burn.

And, much like Bill Cosby, Roseanne Barr has no one but herself to blame for it.

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