On Ferguson’s Dinner’s On Me podcast, the Two And A Half Men creator responded to Ferguson’s curiosity about the “folklore” around the Roseanne writer’s room, and Lorre didn’t hold back. “There was malice,” Lorre explained of his two years writing on Roseanne. “Roseanne hated that there were writers. Fundamentally hated that other people wrote words that she would say.” He noted that it was Barr’s opinion that “She was a stand-up comedian. She’d made herself a superstar based on her words, her writing,” Lorre added, “and the transition to a television show where you need, you can’t do it alone, that wasn’t gonna happen.”
Ferguson, who made reference to the rumor that Barr had put then-husband Tom Arnold’s name on other writers’ scripts, asked Lorre why he’d put up with what other Roseanne veterans have described as a chaotic and volatile set, eliciting from his guest a simple answer. “I’d had, I don’t know, 15, 20 years of poverty and health issues and all sorts of stuff, and I was not going to go back,” said Lorre. “Under no circumstances was I going to go back to scrambling to pay the rent, scrambling to take the kid to a doctor because they have an earache. That is why I put up with it. 60, 70-hour weeks every week. And it was malice. It was absolute.”
Lorre is not alone in recalling that the Roseanne writer’s room was not a fun place to work. Future Buffy The Vampire Slayer creator (and no picnic to work with himself, according to many people) Joss Whedon tells of the time Barr, smarting from both firing nearly her entire first season staff and her place as tabloid fodder, rounded everyone up for what he thought was to be a pre-season pep talk. Instead, according to Whedon, Barr warned her newly hired writers to keep their mouths shut or they’d be out the door as well.
Barr, who notoriously was fired from Roseanne‘s 2017 revival after making racist remarks online about then-President Barack Obama and adviser Valerie Jarrett, has only reinforced her caustic reputation in recent years. Just last week, she took to a podcast to call former TV son Michael Fishman “a little fucking worm” for criticizing her past bigotry.
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