‘Roseanne’ Cancellation Controversy

The popular US sitcom ‘Roseanne’ has been cancelled due to controversy regarding racist tweets from the show’s leading character Roseanne Barr, but what are the wider implications for television and wider society?

Barr tweeted “Muslim brotherhood & planet of the apes had a baby=vj” in the early hours of the morning on May 29th, comparing former adviser to President Barack Obama, Valerie Jarrett, to an ape. The major US broadcasting network ABC swiftly acted to cancel the rebooted ‘Roseane’. The president of ABC Entertainment Group, Channing Dungey, issued a statement addressing Roseanne Barr’s tweets as “abhorrent, repugnant and inconsistent with our values” and the network’s decision to cancel her show.

‘Roseanne’ is considered to be one of the first popular sitcoms to realistically portray a blue-collar American family. The comedy series focused on the Conners, a working-class family from the state of Illinois who struggle to get by on their household income. The series has been praised for the fidelity in its portrayal of the American working-class family. The rebooted tenth series, which ran for nine episodes, presented Roseanne as an overt Trump supporter and voter without being functioning as political propaganda.

Roseanne has been known to be a culturally significant and influential series, giving agency to an American working-class family and fighting ABC network executives in the mid-90s to push storylines which involves homosexual characters. In the series Roseanne’s friendly included a bisexual woman and a gay man and sparked a feud with ABC when they threatened to pull an episode with a lesbian kiss, threatening to take her top-rated show to another network. This was at a time when the representation of the LGBT community on television was sparse and homosexual characters on television were not presented as “normal”.

ABC’s cancellation of Roseanne is a strong example of the network placing the values they uphold over ratings and income. Roseanne was the top-rated programme of the season for the network and it must have been difficult when assessing whether to part ways.

The cancellation of the sitcom is not an attack on free speech, but rather an attack on intolerance and racism

However, Roseanne Barr did have a strong track record of racist and inflammatory comments in the past. ABC’s decision to cancel the programme was in line with their values, yet this begs the question of why Roseanne’s track record was not a red flag when the show was green-lighted for a reboot in 2016. The network essentially handed a large platform for Barr to make this possible, and given their previous knowledge, should be held accountable for this.

There is a danger in turning the Roseanne dilemma into a freedom of speech issue. The cancellation of the sitcom is not an attack on free speech, but rather an attack on intolerance and racism, which are enshrined within free speech itself. The concept of freedom of speech has been attacked. The backlash represents that the idea that freedom of speech does not mean freedom from repercussions from what you say. When reading about freedom of speech I have rarely seen the right to have a television show on a major broadcast network.

At a Trump rally in March, the President of the United States addressed the Ohio crowd, praising the show’s ratings: ‘…look at Roseanne! I called her yesterday, look at her ratings! Look at her ratings!’ Trump goes on to recount his phone call with television producer Mark Burnett and addressing the ‘unbelievable’ ratings to the crowd, exclaiming: “They were unbelievable. Over 18 million people. And it was about us.”

The show and its success was “about us”, “us” being the Trump supporter as well as Trump himself.

The absence of the Trump administration from addressing the tweets and show’s cancellation is disappointing, especially as Trump personally involved himself with the series through claiming that his supporters tuned in because it was a character that supported him and arguing that the show and its success was “about us”, “us” being the Trump supporter as well as Trump himself.

The series itself does not necessarily have to end. There have been suggestions that the show could take a new direction that does not involve Roseanne Barr and focus on her show husband Dan, played by John Goodman. Although this seems rather unlikely at the moment, we’ll see how this pans outs.

The cancellation of Roseanne due to the racially inflammatory tweets has now set a precedent for television executives and viewers to take a stand against racism and bigotry on television, and place their company’s values over profits. It is too early for the impact of this to be seen. However, this must not fall into the trend of people attempting to get shows removed from the air that they do not like and do not fit within their sensibilities. The cancellation depicts that there is no room for racism and bigotry in the television industry, yet this must be distinguished from opinions and values that are not our own.