Roseanne's Reboot Is Booted

Roseanne Barr had it all.  A successful comeback.  A reboot of her late-eighties/early-nineties sitcom.  Eighteen million people watching.  A cash cow for ABC.  Then Barr wrote a racist tweet about former Obama adviser Valerie Jarratt and blamed it on medication.

What prompted Barr to lash out at an adviser to a President who left office in January 2017 is unknown.  But I don't think it was Ambien.

This isn't the first time Valerie Jarratt was on the receiving end of a spew of hatred that came out of nowhere.  When she was on Bill O'Reilly's Fox News show, as you will recall, to talk about helping young black men get ahead, Billo went on an anti-rap rant even though the topic had nothing to do with rap. 

Just like Roseanne's racism has nothing to do with over-the-counter sleep medicine.  (Oh yeah, O'Reilly is long since gone for an unrelated incident.)

Quite frankly, I don't know why ABC wanted to give the most vulgar and the most unlettered comedian in these United States a reboot of her old TV series when the network knew she was a loose cannon.  But then, controversy draws viewers to TV, and more viewers mean more ad revenue, and ABC was profiting handsomely from the reboot of "Roseanne."  ABC could have stood behind her and accepted her non-apology - and kept making all of that money from her show - but the network did the right thing and got rid of her.  

In a bizarre twist of fate, this comes less than three decades after Jackie Mason's sitcom "Chicken Soup" premiered on ABC and earned solid ratings because it followed . . . "Roseanne."  It was produced by the same production company that gave us "Roseanne" as well.  Then Mason, campaigning in the 1989 New York City mayoral election for Republican nominee Rudolph Giuliani, referred to Democratic nominee David Dinkins, aiming to become the first black mayor of New York City,  as a "shvartzer."  Accused of racism, Mason, a Jew, explained that "shvartzer" merely means "black man" in Yiddish and was not meant to be disparaging.  Jews who spoke Yiddish and who peppered their English-language speech with Yiddish words defended Mason, but the fact that Yiddish-language ethnic references are sometimes used disparagingly - in Yiddish, the word "Americaner," for example, is a disparaging term for an Americanized Jew, I've been led to understand - didn't help his case.

On the same day Dinkins was elected mayor of New York, in November 1989, "Chicken Soup" had its last serving.  A few days later ABC canceled it with the official explanation that the network realized the show was only getting good ratings because it followed "Roseanne."  Everyone knew what the real reason was (and by the way, "Chicken Soup" was a substandard show, but had Mason not opened his mouth, it would have stayed on for as long as its ratings were respectable).  This time, "Roseanne" was itself canceled, and there was no sugar-coating the reason why . . . and Mason's "shvartzer" comment seems harmless by comparison.  Ironically, the negative publicity Roseanne Barr received overshadowed the series finale of ABC's "The Middle," which ended its nine-year run following . . . "Roseanne."

Oy vey.  

Back in 1989, no one felt sorry for Jackie Mason, whom New Jersey Star-Ledger TV critic Jerry Krupnick said "shot himself in the mouth."  While I feel sorry for Barr's co-stars, who distanced themselves from her like vampires from garlic, I don't feel sorry for Roseanne herself.  She shot herself in the tweet.