Roseanne Barr Admits She’s Heartbroken Over Her Estranged ‘Roseanne’ Family While Pitching One Last Sitcom

Few TV families have been as beloved, or as bitterly divided, as the Conners of ‘Roseanne’. The story of Roseanne Barr’s estranged TV family has hung over the sitcom for years, long after the cameras stopped rolling on its revival.

At her peak, Barr was arguably the most powerful woman in television, earning $1 million per episode during the original ABC run from 1988 to 1997. Then came 2018, when the network canceled the revival after she posted a tweet about former Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett that was widely condemned as racist. The show was retooled as ‘The Conners’, which killed off Barr’s character with a drug overdose and aired for 7 seasons.

Eight years later, Barr is finally addressing what that fallout did to the people who once played her on-screen relatives. In a new interview with The Hollywood Reporter, she was asked how she gets along with John Goodman and Laurie Metcalf. Her answer was short: “I don’t.”

Pressed on whether she is in contact with the pair at all, Barr replied, “Of course not.” When the interviewer said he had assumed the cast was like a real family, she answered, “I did too.”

From there, she delivered the line that sums up her mood. “Nobody is more brokenhearted than me,” Barr said. “I just choose to remember the fun and the good times.”

Goodman has described the same distance. In an interview last year, he said the 2 had not spoken in about 7 or 8 years. Barr now claims her son recently asked the actor to make a cameo in her new show and that he declined.

The rift reaches beyond Goodman and Metcalf. Michael Fishman, who played her on-screen son, said ‘Roseanne’ was rightfully canceled, and Barr hit back by calling him a worm.

Barr is also still smarting over how ‘The Conners’ handled her exit. She said ABC would only move forward with the spinoff if she was not in it, and she called the opioid-overdose death of her character insulting, noting how many fans still approach her to say, “You were my mom.”

She also weighed in on a separate fight over writing credits from the original sitcom. Chuck Lorre’s memoir says he was made to write scripts credited to Tom Arnold, and Barr’s ex-husband came out swinging in response. Barr sided with him, saying, “Tom Arnold is telling the truth for once,” before adding that she has to thank him for defending her.

Barr maintains the Jarrett tweet was not racist, though it drew widespread condemnation at the time. She also claims she sensed ABC had “taken my show” before the tweet, after learning the writers had been back for at least a month without her.

The conversation doubles as a launchpad for her next project, ‘Meemaw: A Modern Day Fable’. The self-financed, single-camera sitcom is based loosely on her life in Texas Hill Country, with Barr playing the matriarch of a mixed-race family who runs afoul of the law while raising funds for her granddaughter’s bat mitzvah.

Drea de Matteo plays her daughter, Omar Gooding plays her son-in-law, and Randy Quaid appears as a local sheriff. THR, which got a sneak peek, says the tone sits closer to trailer park comedies like ‘My Name Is Earl’ than to the 3-camera repartee of ‘Roseanne’.

Barr says casting brought resistance, with some Black comedians declining to work with her, which she said hurt. Looking back at the revival’s premiere, she also said the audience response convinced her that “I knew I hadn’t lost my connection to people’s hearts.”

Financing came through a co-production with Just the News founder John Solomon, who split costs evenly with Barr. For now, the series still needs a home, and Barr’s pitch to the industry is simple: if anyone wants “a number one show,” she said, “I got it.”

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