With a Racist Tweet, 'Roseanne' Self-Destructs

Two months ago, Roseanne Barr was a star again.

Her sitcom “Roseanne” returned in March after a two-decade absence to enormous ratings on ABC. Network executives were celebrating their strategy of appealing to wider swaths of the country after Donald Trump’s surprising election win and the president himself called Barr to congratulate her on the show’s large audience.

But on Tuesday, that all came crashing down. ABC abruptly canceled “Roseanne” hours after Barr, the show’s star and co-creator, posted a racist tweet about Valerie Jarrett, an African-American woman who was a senior adviser to Barack Obama throughout his presidency and considered one of his most influential aides. Barr wrote if the “muslim brotherhood & planet of the apes had a baby=vj.”

Barr later apologized, but it was too late. In announcing the show’s cancellation, ABC Entertainment President Channing Dungey said in a statement that “Roseanne’s Twitter statement is abhorrent, repugnant and inconsistent with our values.”

The show had ended its successful comeback season last week and was expected to return in September for a 13-episode run. Robert A. Iger, chief executive of the Walt Disney Co., ABC’s corporate parent, shared Dungey’s statement on his own Twitter account, adding: “There was only one thing to do here, and that was the right thing.”

The sudden cancellation of a hit show — it had the highest ratings of a new TV series in years — because of off-screen controversy was almost without precedent.

The show brought in an estimated $45 million of advertising revenue for ABC this year, and the network likely would have collected more than $60 million next season, according to Kantar Media.

The move was decided by top Disney and ABC executives, including Dungey, who was appointed to her role in February 2016, becoming the first black entertainment president of a major broadcast television network. She had the backing of Ben Sherwood, the head of ABC’s television group, and Iger, who was involved in the process starting very early Tuesday, according to two Disney insiders who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe company matters. On a phone call with ABC and her representatives shortly before the show was canceled, Barr expressed remorse for the tweet but did not seem to be fully aware of the potential implications for her sitcom, according to a person familiar with the phone call who spoke on condition of anonymity because it was private.

For Disney, there was more at stake than a hit show. The company has been widely praised in recent years as a leader in efforts to combat racial stereotypes through its movies and TV series, whether on “Doc McStuffins,” a Disney Channel cartoon about an African-American girl who wants to be a doctor; “How to Get Away With Murder,” a vehicle for Viola Davis that led her to become the first black woman to win a lead-actress Emmy; and “Black Panther,” which proved that movies rooted in black culture and with predominantly black casts could not become global blockbusters.

If Disney did not act forcefully with regard to “Roseanne,” much of that work might have been rendered moot.

Jarrett, who appeared at an MSNBC town hall about racism in America on Tuesday, said of Barr’s tweet, “We have to turn it into a teaching moment.”

In her appearance, Jarrett added: “Bob Iger, who’s the CEO of Disney, called me before the announcement. He apologized. He said that he had zero tolerance for that sort of racist, bigoted comment, and he wanted me to know before he made it public that he was canceling the show.”

It did not take long for ABC to move on. A repeat episode scheduled for Tuesday night was promptly replaced with a rerun of “The Middle.” The network also began the process of taking each episode of “Roseanne” off its website, and Hulu, which is partly owned by Disney, is also removing episodes from its service.

The timing of Barr’s outburst was terrible for ABC. She wrote the message just two weeks after the network made its pitch to advertisers about its coming fall lineup, with the hope of attracting up to $9 billion in advertising commitments by summer’s end. “Roseanne,” and its enormous audience and broad appeal, was the centerpiece of ABC’s presentation. Barr was introduced to the stage at Lincoln Center’s David Geffen Hall before any other ABC executive or star. Once there, she joked that her tweets were actually written by Sherwood.

Then came Barr’s tweet about Jarrett.

She made it in response to a tweet suggesting that Jarrett may have had a role in helping Obama in a scheme Trump has branded “Spygate,” a debunked conspiracy theory involving an informant being planted in his campaign that the president has promoted in recent weeks.

Barr initially dismissed accusations that the comment was racist, defending it as “a joke.”

Earlier, Barr had an exchange with Chelsea Clinton after Barr erroneously referred to Clinton as “Chelsea Soros Clinton,” a reference to George Soros, the billionaire liberal donor who is often the focus of conservative critics. Donald Trump Jr. shared one of Barr’s posts in the exchange.

She later deleted the post about Jarrett. About a half-hour later, she offered an apology.

“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.”

Barr also said she was “leaving Twitter.”

But Barr was already being disavowed by longtime colleagues and formerly supportive voices.

Shortly before the cancellation, Wanda Sykes, a consulting producer for the show, quit. Sara Gilbert, a co-star who played Roseanne’s daughter and was a driving force behind the series revival, said she was “disappointed in her actions to say the least.”

The agency ICM dropped Barr as a client, saying it was “distressed by the disgraceful and unacceptable tweet.”

Even Bill O’Reilly, the former Fox anchor who has been supportive of the show, called her tweet “vicious” and said the series “could not continue with the show without insulting millions of Americans.” Asked on Air Force One if Trump had any reaction to the show’s cancellation, the White House press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, demurred. “I think we have a lot bigger things going on in the country right now,” she said.

Canceling the series that quickly was a highly unusual step for a network. When series like “Two and a Half Men,” “House of Cards” or “Transparent” were at the center of storms surrounding their biggest stars, the casts were reworked but remained on the air. But none of the stars involved in those shows were as central to their identity as Barr was to “Roseanne.”

Months before her show’s return, Barr said that her children had taken her social media accounts away from her.

But as viewers flocked to “Roseanne,” Barr returned to Twitter. One of Barr’s messages accused a survivor of the high school shooting in Parkland, Florida, of giving a Nazi salute; another involved a conspiracy theory about Trump quietly breaking up a child sex trafficking ring including prominent Democrats.

“You can’t control Roseanne Barr,” Sherwood said in an interview with The New York Times in March, when asked about her Twitter account. “Many who have tried have failed.”

There were other sources of controversy.

The revival’s third episode featured a joke about two ABC comedies with diverse casts, “Black-ish” and “Fresh Off the Boat.” Barr’s character and her husband, Dan, played by John Goodman, wake up on the their living room couch, having fallen asleep in front of the television. “We missed all the shows about black and Asian families,” Dan Conner said. To laughter from the show’s studio audience, Roseanne Conner responded, “They’re just like us. There, now you’re all caught up.”

The joke prompted an outcry but ABC defended the show. “It certainly wasn’t meant to offend,” Dungey said this month. “I do stand by the ‘Roseanne’ writers.”

Even as “Roseanne” experienced success, ABC’s relationship with the “Black-ish” showrunner, Kenya Barris, deteriorated, in part because of a decision to pull an episode of the show not long before it was set to air. Barris is in negotiations to leave his ABC contract and begin working with Netflix.

“Roseanne” will probably finish the 2017-18 television season as the No. 3 rated show, behind two NBC programs: “Sunday Night Football” and “This is Us.” More than 18 million people on average have watched “Roseanne” this season, according to Nielsen’s delayed viewing data. Tuesday was the first day that “Roseanne” producers and writers convened on the show’s lot in Studio City, California, to begin work on the next season. According to Bruce Rasmussen, an executive producer, they were aware of Barr’s tweet when they arrived and “were horrified.” But they thought it could take a few days for the repercussions to be decided. Instead, within just a few minutes of getting to work, the group of a little more than a dozen people found out the show had been canceled as the news circulated online.

“We were gut-punched,” Rasmussen said. “It was really depressing that that one stupid sentence that she sent out destroyed a whole bunch of peoples’ jobs.”