TV Guide

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, her 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.

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."

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 Connor 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.

ABC is potentially leaving hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue on the table by canceling Roseanne. The show was the top-rated series on TV, with a reported 1 in 10 Americans watching the Season 10 premiere.



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