Late Monday night, Roseanne Barr took to Twitter to participate in one of her favorite pastimes: perpetuating conspiracy theories targeting the “Deep State,” the fictional cabal of public figures Donald Trump and his legion of supporters believe to be actively conspiring against him and his agenda. For a target, she chose Chelsea Clinton, daughter of former president and presidential candidate Bill and Hillary Clinton, calling her “Chelsea Soros Clinton,” a nod to the rumor that she is married to a nephew of George Soros, perpetual bogeyman of the paranoid right. (She isn't.)
By morning, Chelsea Clinton had replied in order to correct the tweet. Barr quickly apologized but made sure to mention that Soros was “a nazi who turned in his fellow Jews 2 be murdered in German concentration camps & stole their wealth,” an anti-Semitic rumor that conspiracy theorists have propagated for years, before then firing back that Chelsea was married to the son of a “corrupt senator.” (Clinton's father-in-law, Edward Mezvinsky, was an Iowa congressman in the 1970s, never a senator. He was convicted of fraud many years later on charges unrelated to his political career.)
The exchange was unsettling, but par for the course for a comedian who has, in recent months, made waves by participating in wild-eyed speculation about plots and schemes on social media. Barr’s remarks might have gone unnoticed had she not also replied to a conversation about “Spygate,” the fictional story that President Barack Obama conspired with Hillary Clinton to implant a spy in Donald Trump’s campaign, and commented on the appearance of former Obama senior adviser Valerie Jarrett, tweeting that Jarrett looked like the Muslim Brotherhood and Planet of the Apes had produced a baby.
Those remarks, rightly perceived as racist in nature, created a firestorm Tuesday that led to Barr releasing an apology and announcing she planned to leave Twitter. Her regret, however, wasn’t enough to save her job. ABC Entertainment President Channing Dungey announced the network would cancel "Roseanne," the recent sitcom reboot that had enjoyed overwhelmingly positive ratings, effective immediately. “Roseanne’s Twitter statement is abhorrent, repugnant and inconsistent with our values,” the statement read, “and we have decided to cancel her show.”
ABC’s reaction was immediate and met with near-universal acclaim. Though the cancellation would affect “at least 200 jobs,” a mass exodus of onscreen talent had already begun, including writer Wanda Sykes and actress Emma Kenney. Other networks have already announced their intention to pull reruns of the original "Roseanne" from their lineups. The swiftness of Tuesday’s events has left many in the media world stunned at just how quickly the narrative changed.
Last week, "Roseanne" was a ratings winner and the center of ABC’s programming. By Tuesday evening, Roseanne Barr’s resurgent career was widely considered dead on arrival.
Some wondered what happened, while others wondered (among them, Salon's Melanie McFarland) why it had been allowed to happen in the first place.
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“I wish so bad I could quit.”
This was the last line in an email I received from an employee at ABC the day after the "Roseanne" reboot premiered. Like so many others, I’d tuned in to watch the initial two episodes out of curiosity. As a child of a blue-collar, Midwestern family, the original "Roseanne" held a special place in my heart. The Conners were dysfunctional, unhealthy and they more closely resembled my people than anyone else on the television dial. I was concerned, however, because advance media centered on Roseanne Barr’s very public support of Donald Trump for president and talk of how the show would tackle portraying a family who’d supported the problematic nominee.
To my horror, the reboot pandered to the Make America Great Again crowd. Roseanne and Dan had favored Trump because of “jobs” and lambasted Jackie, Roseanne’s left-leaning sister, for wanting health care the country couldn’t afford. The premiere tried to pull double duty by inoculating Roseanne from any charges of racism or intolerance: Her granddaughter and grandson, respectively, were of mixed race and experimented with fluid gender. The show was hammering home its point without relent. Here were Trump supporters who voted for him for all the right reasons. Here were the reasonable Trump people.
Quickly I realized ABC had pulled off a pretty remarkable marketing strategy. Placing "Roseanne" in a lineup containing the likes of "Black-ish," "The Goldbergs" and "Fresh Off the Boat" meant the network could market to every possible demographic. The politics of "Roseanne" and the show's titular star would be cleaned up in order to appeal to Trump voters’ need for entertainment that validated their problematic worldview.
The goal of the rebooted "Roseanne" seemed painfully obvious: Normalize the racism and intolerance of Trump supporters for gain and profit.
Within a few minutes of posting my observations, I was inundated with talent from ABC and its parent company Disney, everyone who reached out voicing their disgust with the network’s decision to greenlight the reboot. Several aired their concern that the show had not only used multicultural children as a sort of “human shield” for Barr, but that a team of liberal comics had been hired in order to traverse the choppy political waters the show would need to get past if it was going to be a cross-demographic hit.
“This is as cynical as it gets,” one person wrote. “This is putting makeup and a million-dollar dress on pure, unabashed intolerance.”
Another told me, “I never in my life thought I would hate my employer more than I do right now. It makes me sick to think I’m associated with these people. Just sick.”
The strategy worked, as the "Roseanne" reboot was one of the biggest ratings hits in forever. Roughly 18 million Americans tuned in to watch the premiere, and ABC was able to earn upwards of $45 million in advertising for the first return season. Critics of the show’s obvious pandering and problematic narrative were shouted down by conservative talking heads championing a show people obviously wanted to see.
“Yes, it’s going to do giant numbers,” an ABC/Disney employee told me, “but at what cost? How much money should someone charge to sell their soul?”
* * *
These recent postings by Barr are anything but out of the ordinary. In recent months she has consistently accused public figures of grotesque crimes, many of them originating from the deepest and darkest bowels of the internet conspiracy world. Her favorite ongoing conspiracy has been the Internet meme QAnon, an incomprehensible collection of gibberish and fevered paranoia that has kept forums and amateur right-wing sleuths busy ever since posts bearing that label first appeared on the online sewer 4chan.
QAnon is one part Wikipedia, one part Nostradamus and 10 parts Alex Jones, an amalgamation of anonymous posts that tie together recent events with opaque sentence fragments that appear, if you squint at them the right way, to reveal a massive conspiracy in opposition to Donald Trump. The posts and theories have become so widespread, varied and jumbled because of crowdsourcing that, to an outsider, they can appear unintelligible. But the underlying narrative – that Obama, the Clintons, Soros, the media and a collection of pedophiles and criminals are engaged in an unending campaign of treason – seems universally accepted.
Barr seems fascinated by the scene and has regularly expounded its allure and celebrated its victories. In a bizarre post after the reboot’s premiere she tweeted, “President Trump has freed so many children held in bondage to pimps around the world. Hundreds each month. He has broken up trafficking rings in high places everywhere.” This fictional narrative is regularly disseminated in QAnon circles, where it's believed that the president is dismantling the underground pedophilia operations of the rich and powerful.
Those beliefs, coupled with Barr's false accusations against the Clintons, Obamas and Soros, are certainly in line with many of Trump’s supporters, who regularly gobble up his accusations of “fake news” perpetrated by media he has called “enemies of the people.” The "Deep State," his invisible and imaginary enemy that can encompass anyone who opposes him at the moment, is certainly a part of the QAnon fever dream. It’s that type of worldview that regularly allows Trump's base to look past the many and damning lies and instances of incompetency that have plagued his administration.
Unfortunately, the racist tweet that Barr posted Monday night also falls in line with that point of view. Ever since Trump announced his candidacy two summers ago by declaring that Mexico was sending drug dealers and rapists across the border, the line in the sand has been clear and definite. If you are to stand with him you are either guilty of racist intent or else willing to accept racist intent on the part of others.
Barr has shown on which side of the line she resides. No matter what her sitcom or any other show tries to sell them, Trump’s supporters will have to determine for themselves on which side they belong.
* * *
According to an article in The New York Times, ABC executives met on Nov. 8, 2016, the morning of the presidential election, and discussed strategies to appeal to the heartland of America, a population they felt they had ignored with their recent schedule of multicultural sitcoms. The same Channing Dungey who would cancel "Roseanne" a year-and-a-half later reportedly remarked that the network’s top brass felt as if they had forgotten a large portion of prospective viewers.
Ben Sherwood, president of Disney and ABC’s television group, was quoted as saying he thought the massive premiere ratings for "Roseanne" were “a mistake” at first and observed that they must have resulted from “a large number of people in the country who don’t see themselves on television very often.”
In today’s polarized environment, the effort to market to Trump’s voters was a remarkable gamble. While most corporations are advertising multiculturalism and betting their money on progress and inclusion, ABC’s strategy was to reach every potential market, even if that meant receiving blowback in the process. The initial bet paid off, catching the executives, and the rest of the country, off-guard. The same company that promoted "Black-ish" and the recent Marvel Universe hit movie "Black Panther" had managed to walk a thin line and find purchase with many of America’s diverse and often opposed demographics.
With the exception of Fox News and the alternate universe of right-wing media, few corporations have managed to connect with Trump’s base, possibly because of the great risks attached to such a strategy. For the "Roseanne" reboot to succeed, ABC needed the assembled writing team to vent some of the political tension, establish good faith and then move forward once the show had appealed to Trump’s base, while not alienating the rest of our shared society. To everyone’s surprise, the show managed to thread that needle and find mainstream success.
Barr’s erratic and problematic behavior was perhaps the difficulty ABC failed to foresee. For "Roseanne" to thrive, its namesake star would need to appeal to the conservative crowd without alienating people who were profoundly uncomfortable with Donald Trump’s politics.
The show's writers and producers set out to portray the Conners as the sanitized family Trump voters believe themselves to be. But in due course, Roseanne Barr, the authentic article, couldn’t maintain her cover and revealed herself as the embodiment of the racist and paranoid reflection Trump’s base fears when they look into the mirror.
“This is what happens when you get into business with racists and try to normalize racism as 'giving the other side a voice,'” an ABC/Disney personality told me a few minutes after the cancellation had been announced. “There is no other side of racism.”
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