Today, Explained - Roseanne gets canned

Episode Date: May 30, 2018

ABC canceled the popular reboot of Roseanne after its star likened President Obama’s former advisor, an African-American woman, to an ape on Twitter. Today, Roseanne Barr blamed her tweets on Ambien. The manufacturer responded that “racism is not a known side effect.” Vox’s Todd VanDerWerff explores why the Trump-era reboot was so well received, and whether TV can bring opposite poles of the American political spectrum together. ******************************************** Big news: A Harvard study says over 4,600 people died in Puerto Rico due to Hurricane Maria - a far cry from the official estimate of 64. Listen to our explainer on how things got so bad in Puerto Rico: https://art19.com/shows/today-explained/episodes/75841e00-a9cd-4031-9d47-43d522b64a2c Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Todd Vanderwerf, critic at large at Vox. Roseanne got cancelled by ABC just yesterday. What's the party line on why? So just yesterday, Roseanne was on Twitter and she tweeted a thing about former Obama aide Valerie Jarrett, which said that Valerie Jarrett looked like the Muslim Brotherhood and Planet of the Apes had a baby. Needless to say, this was seen as extraordinarily racist.

It very quickly became a controversy ABC could not ignore. Consequently, they canceled the show after writer Wanda Sykes said that she was not going to be working on the show anymore. And actor Sarah Gilbert, who's also a producer on the series, chastised Roseanne. Some of the other cast members were speaking up. We've heard that Emma Kenney, who played one of the children on the show, was calling him to quit the show when it was canceled. So this was a firestorm that ABC just had no other recourse to contain. Was she just kind of going on a Roseanne rant or what? What else was going on? She was in the middle of a conversation with some other people. Roseanne is a big promoter of far right-wing conspiracy theories. One of them you may have heard of is something called QAnon, which is this idea that Donald Trump is secretly part of this movement to rid the world of child predators, which include many people in Hollywood, many Democrats, etc. Roseanne has been very involved in these sorts of conspiracy theories.

And the idea that she was responding to was that Valerie Jarrett helped Obama cover up a lot of these crimes. That's what's kind of curious about this. This isn't like Roseanne woke up one day and decided that she was racist and uncouth and a conspiracy theorist. This has been happening like forever. So did ABC not know? ABC knew.

ABC, as recently as a couple of months ago, was like, well, we can't control Roseanne. There was sort of this effort to keep her Twitter feed out of her hands. Her kids were in charge of it for a while. There was kind of this hope that maybe she could be held together without saying anything horribly racist for a season of a TV show, which ultimately happened. But it was never going to work long term. It was always a ticking time bomb sort of hanging over the show. Was this a tough call for ABC, even considering the extreme offensive nature of these tweets?

Because the show was doing pretty well, right? Yeah, it was by some metrics, the number one show on TV. And is there a precedent for like the number one TV show getting canceled? The only precedent is shows that had agreed to end their run. So you're thinking about shows like Andy Griffith and Seinfeld, which ended their run at the top of their games, but all the actors involved were like, we want to do other things. Right. What you're looking at is basically unprecedented in TV history.

So I was only allowed to watch like a half hour of TV a day as a kid. And I usually chose The Fresh Prince or Saved by the Bell. I don't really know why people love this show to begin with. So I was wondering if you could kind of take us back to how it became so popular in the 90s, I guess. So this is one of those shows that was an instant hit when it debuted in 1988. It was fresh and funny and it was original. And the thing that I think was so new about it was that it was the voice of this woman that had not really been represented on TV before. It was about people who looked like America, who talked like America, who had economic

problems like America. And at that point in the show's run, it was, I guess you'd say for the time it was quite progressive. It had things like LGBT representation. It talked forthrightly about economic struggles. It was sort of a thumb in the eye of a lot of the ideas of Reaganomics and the George H.W. Bush presidency. And I think that people loved the way it tackled the reality of living on the ground in America, but also had this sort of strong sense of this idea that we look out for each other in our communities, even if the government has forgotten about us. When you think about some of the most iconic shows of the 90s, the Seinfeld, Simpsons, you can reference the Bet episode.

I'm out. The Kenny Rogers chicken episode. You look a little stressed. Oh, I'm stressed. Are there those kinds of classic episodes of the Roseanne show, the original iteration that you can think of? Absolutely. You know, probably my favorite episode of the show is called A Stash From the Past.

It's an episode about Roseanne and Jackie, her sister, played by Laurie Metcalf, and Dan, her husband, played by John Goodman. They find some pot, and they think it's one of the kids, and they're going to do like the anti-drug thing. There is a 12-year-old boy living here, and if you ever bring drugs in my house again, you're out. You got it? But it turns out to be like an old stash of roseanne and dance i believe it's been a while since i've seen the episode and then they they smoke it what the hell are you doing you're rolling a joint after yelling at david for bringing pot in the house and you're doing it all wrong and it's like one of the best

tv episodes that talks about why people use drugs, but also how there can be this over-dependence on drugs that leads to abuse, that leads to addiction, things like that. It's a really smart episode that doesn't try to come down one way or the other. There are some other terrific episodes, like dealing with the death of Roseanne's abusive father, her oldest daughter Becky going on birth control. It's just really a smart, well-rounded show for, I'd say, probably the first six seasons of its run, and there are a lot of classics in there. And what happened? Did, like every other sitcom, that it gets sort of tired and episodic? They ran out of ideas, as you'd expect a show that old to do. And then by the last season, Roseanne won the lottery. She became obscenely rich. It was kind of an interesting

commentary on how the real life Roseanne went from a housewife stand-up to one of the richest and most powerful women in television. But at the same time, it was not a very good season of TV. I'm sure ABC would have loved to have more of the show to run. But by that time, it was a shadow of its former rating self. They were ending at a time when the show could still sort of vaguely say it was in the cultural conversation and it had cachet. So some 20 years later, ABC and Roseanne, I'm guessing, decide to bring the show back. Well, actually, the idea started with cast member Sarah Gilbert, who played middle daughter Darlene on the series. She really got the cast back together on her CBS talk show, The Talk.

Okay. They really hit it off. They clicked. And she was like, if we did a revival, would that be great? ABC, of course, wanted to do it because ABC was in the ratings doldrums. It's one of those things that seemed like a good idea. But at the same time, ABC probably could have checked more into Roseanne's Twitter feed. Ladies and gentlemen, here's the guy who really writes most of my tweets, the chairman of Disney Media Networks and president of Disney ABC television group, Ben Sherwood.

And for the record, I have absolutely nothing to do with Roseanne's Twitter account. What about her more famous co-stars, Laurie Metcalf, John Goodman? I mean, I don't know what John Goodman's politics are, but he's out there mocking Rex Tillerson on SNL. Why would he sign on to hang out with this racist conspiracy theorist? One of the things that is easy to forget is that back when her show was on the air, Roseanne was a loose cannon as well. She badly sang the national anthem at a San Diego Padres game. Or the land of the free. Or the home of the brave.

Classic. Her relationship with Tom Arnold was a tabloid mainstay. She had all of these sort of stories that marked her as this crazy Hollywood person. And yet at the same time, she was pushing toward greater gay and lesbian representation. She was pushing toward talking about economic issues. She had a famous episode of her show that was all about the roots of racism among white people. All of these things that she was doing that sort of bought her some leeway with people who have a more progressive political bent. I know that Sarah Gilbert does, who is the producer of the show. And I think that they were trying to exemplify in some ways the ideas of the show, which is that we all need to talk about our political differences. And I also think nobody thought the show was going to come back as big as it did. It came back to 18 million viewers, which in this day and age is crazy. Who was watching? When you factor in DVR and streaming viewership, 27 million people watched it. So you have to figure that there were a lot of people of color watching. There were a lot of urbanites watching. There were a lot of people you would not expect from just hearing Roseanne Barr, Trump supporter,

to be watching. But at the same time, it was sort of championed by Trump and folks like him as a victory for Donald Trump's way of viewing the world because Roseanne Barr is perhaps the most famous Donald Trump supporter. I would actually disagree with that point because Donald Trump is the most famous Donald Trump supporter. This is true. I just was thinking that. He is definitely the most famous Donald Trump supporter. So in the end, was it just Roseanne's tweets that got her fired yesterday? Was the show going to get booked for another season?

The show was already declining before this happened. Like you could make an argument that it was only going to decline further in season two and ABC could sort of see that writing on the wall. It still would have been a huge hit. It still would have been bigger than their other comedies probably in that world. But also you've got to look at kind of the long term picture of this, which is yes, in the short term, having Roseanne on the air is going to get you lots of advertising dollars. But in the long term, she's going to tweet more things that are going to turn those advertisers off that make the other people on your network say,

I don't really want to be associated with this. I got to get away from ABC. If you have Roseanne on the air, eventually ABC becomes the de facto supporter of Roseanne Barr's Twitter feed. And that's the thing that I'm sure they weighed heavily when they made this decision. A lot of people thought the Roseanne reboot was an opportunity to bring a divided country and culture together. So, does the cancellation mean that more shows like this ain't gonna happen? That's next on Today Explained. The number one album in America right now is by a Korean pop band called BTS. If that's confusing to you or you've just always wanted to understand K-pop, we've got an explanation for you. Not on this show, but on Vox's new Netflix show. It's called Explained, and it has killer theme music.

You know what's even better than theme music? The show. It's really good, and the K-pop episode is one of my favorites. It's funny, it's super interesting, and it features a lot of the OG creators of Korean pop music. Oh, and it's like 15 minutes long. Understand everything there is to know about K-pop in 15 minutes by searching for Vox on Netflix or go to netflix.com slash explained. There's new episodes of the show every Wednesday, and today's episode is about K-pop.

You know, back when the show came out, Sarah Silverman tweeted, watched At Roseanne on ABC last night and loved it. That familiar feeling of the old, but with comedy and content so totally of this moment, like the angst within close families over politics. Hope y'all let go of needing art to reflect slash express only what you yourself feel. That's not what art's for. She was basically saying that the show might bring us closer together in the age of Donald Trump. And that's a sentiment that a lot of people have echoed. But is this Roseanne reboot getting canceled sort of evidence that that's just not going to work? No, I don't think so. I think that we need to have room on TV for these conversations about being alive in the Donald Trump era and what that means to our individual communities, to our individual selves. I think that there is room to do TV ways. It's not as good as Roseanne, but Tim Allen's character on that show is very much of means. His family has more

than enough to live by. He's almost a more honest depiction of a Trump supporter because he is an aging white man with a fair amount of money who feels threatened by the world that is like coming for him. Ladies and gentlemen. You can't say ladies and gentlemen because it excludes those who don't identify as either. But those are the only two choices. Hey, everybody. America's the land of opportunity. I stand before you. Stop. Okay, by saying that America's the land of opportunity, you are implying that everyone has the same opportunities. I'm not implying it. I'm saying it.

Are there good shows about working class people for all the people out there who want to watch some good working class shows? Yeah, several of them are going to be on my best TV of the year list and Roseanne was not going to be. The show One Day at a Time on Netflix explores a Cuban American family that now is sort of dealing with living in Donald Trump's America and does that without saying the name Donald Trump. He said, go back to Mexico. Alex, we're going to figure this out. But you can't hit somebody every time they call you a name.

I don't. It was just this time. But this has happened before? Yeah. Once at a baseball game, the team was leaving on their bus, and he saw me and yelled, build the wall. You have the middle. That one is in reruns all of the time. It's very much like Roseanne, but with a sweeter edge. It's about this white working class experience, there are nine seasons of that show. Or another one is Bob's Burgers, another show about a white working class family. In this case, they run a hamburger stand. There are all of these shows out there that explore these issues.

The thing Roseanne did that I think people liked was she was loud and angry and she liked to yell about Donald Trump and she occasionally tweeted racist things. And I think that some of the people who are saying Roseanne can't be silenced don't actually know how many white working class families there are on TV right now. And mostly just want to have somebody who's loud and angry and yells a lot. Todd, you know, ABC has a show called Blackish and the network refused to run its episode about football players taking a knee. I think it's like permanently shelved, right? Yes. If it shows up someday, it would be on the DVD or something. for being bluntly political. Was this a case of like, I don't know, a bunch of presumably liberal

people who run sitcom programming at ABC being worried about having these blind spots and seeming too liberal? And so just overcompensating by letting this person who had so many problematic things to say have a show? Or was it just like a bunch of people who were swooning over big ratings? A little of both. I think once the ratings came in, they were in a much bigger bind. If the show had come back with modest ratings, I think everybody would have been perfectly happy with that. They wouldn't have been as quick to renew it.

So I do think you can't like write the ratings out of this story. But I do think that there is some level of Hollywood knowing it needs to talk about Trump and Trump supporters, but not really having any idea how to do that. writers, creators of shows that have created shows sort of based on their own upbringing in rural areas, in blue collar areas, in more diverse communities. And often they'll run into this like wall at the executive level of people who are so rich, they don't understand what that world is like. And Roseanne was kind of a backdoor way to talk about those things and, you know, get some good ratings from it. Todd Vanderwerf writes about TV for Vox. He also hosts the popular culture podcast, I Think You're Interesting. A few weeks ago, we took a look at Puerto Rico on this show. It was the six-month anniversary of Hurricane Maria.

And one of the things we talked about was the government's death count and how it was way, way lower than what people on the ground were seeing. Yesterday, a study came out that estimates some 4,600 people may have died as a result of the storm. It's a staggering number, and if you're trying to wrap your head around it, our episode could help. There's a link to it in today's show description. I'm Sean Ramos from This Is Today Explained. Thank you.