But 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.” Ms. 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,” Ms. 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. Mr. 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, Calif., to begin work on the next season. According to Bruce Rasmussen, an executive producer, they were aware of Ms. 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,” Mr. Rasmussen said. “It was really depressing that that one stupid sentence that she sent out destroyed a whole bunch of peoples’ jobs.”
Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/29/business/media/roseanne-barr-offensive-tweets.html?partner=rss&emc=rss
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