Roseanne Canceled by ABC After Roseanne Barr’s Racist Tweet – Today’s News: Our Take

The fallout from Roseanne Barr‘s tweet comparing former Obama advisor Valerie Jarrett, a black woman, to an ape has been swift and decisive. ABC has canceled Roseanne, Barr’s show.

“Roseanne’s Twitter statement is abhorrent, repugnant and inconsistent with our values, and we have decided to cancel her show,” ABC Entertainment President Channing Dungey wrote in a terse statement. ABC is potentially leaving hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue on the table by canceling Roseanne. The show was the top-rated series of the 2017-18 season, with a reported 1 in 10 Americans watching the Season 10 premiere.

Early Tuesday morning, Barr tweeted “muslim brotherhood & planet of the apes had a baby=vj,” in reference to Jarrett, who was a senior advisor to Barack Obama throughout his presidency. Barr, a vocal conservative conspiracy theorist, was both making a false claim that Jarrett is a member of the radical Sunni Islamist group and comparing a black woman to an ape. The tweet has since been deleted.

Ava DuVernay, Bellamy Young and More React to Roseanne‘s Cancellation

Denunciation for Barr’s tweet came quickly, with Roseanne writer Wanda Sykes announcing she was leaving the show and co-star/executive producer Sara Gilbert calling Barr’s tweet “abhorrent” and saying Barr does not speak for the rest of the cast and crew. And before it was even noon on the West Coast ABC dropped the hammer by canceling the show.

Bob Iger, CEO of ABC’s parent company Disney, said canceling the show was “the right thing,” and retweeted Dungey’s statement.

Roseanne showrunner Bruce Helford also released a statement denouncing Barr’s tweet. “On behalf of all the writers and producers, we worked incredibly hard to create an amazing show. I was personally horrified and saddened by the comments and in no way do they reflect the values of the people who worked so hard to make this the iconic show that it is.”

Shortly after the cancellation, Barr’s talent agency ICM Partners dropped her as a client, Variety reports.

Before the cancellation, Barr apologized for her tweet, writing “I apologize to Valerie Jarrett and to all Americans,” she wrote. “I am truly sorry for making a bad joke about her politics and her looks. I should have known better. Forgive me – my joke was in bad taste.” Previously she had doubled down on the tweet, saying “It’s a joke” in response to a CNN reporter who criticized her.

But it’s not really a joke. Barr is a vocal Trump supporter with a long history of incendiary right-wing social media posts. The Roseanne revival itself has had an uneasy relationship with race including a plot about Roseanne Conner suspecting her Muslim neighbors were terrorists. Barr’s Tuesday tweet is not an outlier, but part of a long history of ugliness on Barr’s part that ABC was willing to tolerate until it wasn’t anymore.