“Roseanne” Reboot Gets the Boot: Here’s The Real Reason Why

Her career resurrected this year to massive acclaim. It
started with Sara Gilbert, one of the child actors on the program, who reached
out to Roseanne to see if she wanted to produce a Roseanne reboot. She was willing
to do it, as long as John Goodman and the rest of the original cast were on
board. The first episode was a monumental success.

Yet within two months it’s all come crashing down
because of a bad tweet. Last week, she considered giving up Twitter
because of the rank anti-Semitism on the platform. Perhaps she should have
followed her own advice and spared herself the sudden downfall which has
overwhelmed her.

Then again, is this fallout really justified? What is really
going on here?

She made an insensitive joke about Valerie Jarret, the
former senior advisor to President Barack Obama. On her Twitter feed, Roseanne
tweeted:

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

Jarrett is a Muslim. Does she look like a monkey? Ugh, who
really cares at this point? Was Roseanne’s joke insensitive? Yes. Bad taste?
Sure. But Racist? Now we’re getting into some murky territory.

Racism is defined as “prejudice, discrimination, or
antagonism directed against someone of a different race based on the belief
that one's own race is superior.” Never has Barr suggested that she’s better
than others because of her skin color or ethnic background. Are we ascribing “
Racism” to words themselves, now?

Trump’s campaign and Presidency were billed as triumphs over
this kind of knee-jerk outrage culture which has overwhelmed this country’s
discourse and political culture.

ABC cancelled the Roseanne Reboot because of one bad joke.
This was not a business decision.

Recall that ABC had cancelled the successful
conservative-leaning sitcom “Last Man Standing” starring Tim Allen,
even though Allen never cracked any incendiary, politicized jokes, and the
show’s ratings soared. ABC’s corporate leaders are liberals, simple as that.
Fox News is reviving the show. ABC has made bad programming decisions before.

Is Roseanne unique in comparing public figures to apes? Bill
Maher compared Donald Trump to an orangutan. Where’s the outrage? He also said
the N-word, but he still muddies the airwaves. He has faced petitions and
boycotts before, but he weathered those storms, and his corporate owners stood
with him. The Los Angeles conservative radio hosts Jon and Ken called
Whitney Houston a “crack whore” on the air. She had just died from
an overdose, too. ABC (yes, the same company!) 

suspended them, but they
apologized and returned, and no one condemned them for racism, either.

Wanda
Sykes made ribald jokes about after his victory. Following ten
minutes of booing, Sykes cursed at the audience, then switched subjects. Despite
her despicable behavior, she still enjoys her stand-up career. She was also a
guest star on “Roseanne”, and she announced she was quitting because of the bad
tweet, too.

The most surprising reaction to this not-so-rosy fallout
comes from Breitbart News’ commentator
John Nolte. He defended ABC’s decision to fire Barr, comparing the
fallout to Roseanne’s bad joke to the repeated acts of disrespect from the
NFL’s kneeling professional athletes. The punishment against the (now former)
sitcom star does not fit the crime. For one bad joke, not only is Roseanne Barr
getting the ax, but the entire show, the cast members, and the crew are thrown
off their jobs, too. ABC is spreading the pain, and it’s not fair. I don’t
recall the NFL shutting down or disenfranchising entire teams over the
anti-patriotic antics of Colin Kaepernick. The league eventually established
new rules in response to the financial boycott of an outraged public.

The producers should have stood by their woman and let time
pass. If her audience tuned out in the same way that the public was abandoning
the football games, then the producers could have had the show cancelled then.
But their decision to cancel the show happened so fast,  the public didn’t have a chance to be
offended.

What’s really going on?

Let’s start with what made Roseanne a hot ticket in the
first place. Her working-class persona then and now appealed to everyday
audiences. No matter how down-and-out their lives, Roseanne found ways to make
lemonade out of life’s lemons. She depicted and made light of the troubles
which the vast majority of us “little people” face, the same problems which
political and culture elites have not only ignored but made worse in their
self-serving push to enrich themselves through cheap labor and corporate
cronyism. 

Roseanne represented the same whom Donald Trump resonated
with, and whose votes helped him win the Presidency—and they happen to be the
same people whom the liberal media, academia, and other progressive
institutions despise, all the more because the Work Man’s representative is now
President. The Democratic Party’s media arm (ABC, as well as CBS and NBC)
couldn’t stand the idea of a working-class sitcom, yet they couldn’t
arbitrarily turn down Roseanne’s immense ratings and the profits which would
follow. They had dispensed with “Last Man Standing” for dubious reasons last
year. They could not risk alienating their already diminishing market share so
easily a second time.

Roseanne the actress, not just the character she payed,
supports Trump, and she was not afraid to proclaim her support for the
President—and Hollywood couldn’t stand it. ABC corporate leaders were looking
for an excuse to drop the show. Roseanne stuck the smug elitism of the
corporate media in the eye twice over. The cancellation of the Roseanne Reboot
was a political decision, a sign that our cultural leaders are not only out of
touch, but willing to ruin their bottom line in the process.