Roseanne Barr says she’s ready for a comeback, eight years after ABC fired her from the “Roseanne” reboot over a tweet about former Obama aide Valerie Jarrett. The 73-year-old comedian has self-financed a new sitcom, “Meemaw: A Modern Day Fable,” set among a mixed-race prepper family in Texas, and she’s shopping it around.
“Anybody who wants a number one show and is smart enough to take a number one show,” Barr told The Hollywood Reporter this week when asked who she’s pitching the project to.
“I don’t know why they don’t want a number one show and why they hate a number one show and why they would destroy a number one show. But if they do want a number one show, I got it.”
The original “Roseanne” reboot drew tens of millions of viewers weekly and finished its first season as the number one primetime sitcom in the 18-49 demographic, according to Variety.
Barr said she’s also pitched “Meemaw” to Elon Musk, without success. “I don’t know why he hasn’t called me or returned my calls,” she said. “I mean, of all people on earth, I’m the one he should call, but I don’t know.”
A Texas story, drawn from her own life
“Meemaw” centers on the matriarch of a mixed-race Texas family who are preppers — people, as Barr describes it, who are “prepared of the end of the world.” The premise, she says, is personal. “I’m a prepper. I live in Texas. Everybody’s a prepper here,” Barr said.
The cast includes Drea de Matteo, Omar Gooding and Randy Quaid, who plays Barr’s love interest. “I’m in love with him and I wish he would leave his wife and marry me,” Barr joked. “I enjoyed making out with him so much that I wrote extra scenes where we would make out.”
Barr hasn’t shown the show to anyone yet. “But it is so funny,” she said. “It’s the funniest s— I’ve ever done, and I had a ball and I play a really wacky old lady this time.”
Revisiting the tweet that ended her reboot
Barr continues to insist the 2018 tweet that got her fired was not racist. “It was not a racist tweet,” she said. “It wasn’t about race, it was about politics. What it really was a three-month conversation between myself and journalists in Iran who were talking about attacks mostly on Iranian women in the streets.”
After apologizing at the time, Barr claims ABC gave her an ultimatum: sign away her rights to the show so it could continue without her as “The Conners,” or see the whole cast and crew lose their jobs.
“ABC demanded that they would only make [the show] if I were not [in it]. And they called me and said, ‘You have a choice to make: You can sign off on letting us do a show without you [or everyone is out of a job.]'”
Barr said her condition was an acknowledgment that she wasn’t racist. “The only thing that mattered to me at the time is I said, ‘I want you to say I’m not a racist and that you know I’m not a racist and that my whole life has been about fighting racism and that you know it.'”
She claims a producer, identified as Werner, responded: “I will do that once you sign away your rights. And also I promise you, if you sign away your rights for this season, that we’ll make sure that everybody knows you did it to save the jobs of the crew.”
Barr said she received no payment for the seven seasons of “The Conners” that followed. “Nope. It was all a trick,” she said. Her character was written off as having died from an opioid overdose. “That was a nice way to kill America’s mom,” Barr said. “Drug overdose.”
