Roseanne claims she was losing control of her show ahead of career-ending tweet

In a wide-ranging and characteristically unhinged interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Roseanne Barr explains that her TV revival was already going south.

By Matt Schimkowitz  |  October 20, 2026 | 2:52pm
Gage Skidmore from Surprise, AZ, United States of America
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Roseanne claims she was losing control of her show ahead of career-ending tweet

It’s perhaps unsurprising that Roseanne Barr, the disgraced comedian who threw it all away for late-night, supposedly-Ambien-fueled racism on Twitter, would do herself no favors in a characteristically unhinged interview with The Hollywood Reporter to promote her self-financed new series, Meemaw: A Modern Day Fable. The show follows the matriarch of a mixed-race family of doomsday preppers as she plans her granddaughter’s bat mitzvah. Covering how much she enjoyed making out with Randy Quaid, her love of the Teamsters, and where Lisa Marie ranked Michael Jackson in bed, Roseanne went off in as many directions as that brief plot synopsis. But perhaps the most revealing, if equally unsurprising, admission is that she was already losing her show ahead of her so-called cancellation. 

To back up, two months after the Roseanne revival was renewed in 2018, Barr made a racist tweet (she denies its racism) about Obama advisor Valerie Jarrett, insinuating that she was a member of the Muslim Brotherhood and comparing her to The Planet Of The Apes. Barr still believes, without evidence, that Jarrett is affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood and, per this THR interview, she “always called the government in Iran ‘Planet of the Apes.'” Either way, no one took it like that. The show’s head writer, Wanda Sykes, quit the show, not only because of the tweet, but also due to a pattern of behavior from the star. Barr was fired, and the show continued for several more seasons. 

In Barr’s telling, though, she was already losing the show. According to her, and we probably don’t need to mention it, but maybe take her recollection with a grain of salt, the writers had already begun cutting her out of the writing process for season two. She says:

I was pretty much the ceremonial head writer, right? It was my show, and I outlined and went over every script in the writers’ room that season. And the guy says to me, ‘Oh, the writers are already back.’ I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I said, ‘How long have they been back?’ ‘Oh, at least a month. But all the writers, they really want you to drop by.’ These are the words that hit me so hard. It was like getting hit with a board. I knew at that moment, ‘Oh my God, they have taken my show. I gave them a number one show; they have taken it away from me.””

In her mind, these were the machinations of producer Tom Werner, who “was trying to steal my show” since the initial run and tried to fire her from it. Apparently, he was just waiting for her to do the hard work for him. “I had a couple beers, take Ambien, go to bed, have my computer in bed with me, which I always do because I can’t sleep,” she continues. “I wake up and that’s where my brain’s at. They’ve taken my show. I was feeling sorry for myself. Christ, this is the reward I get for giving them a number one show, that they take it from me.” 

It bears repeating that the Valerie Jarrett tweet was one example of the types of unfavorable attention Barr had been attracting on Twitter. She would later have to “sincerely apologize” for calling George Soros a Nazi. (The tweet was later deleted, and she went on to promote other conspiracy theories and theorists on her timeline.) In 2023, she’d go on Theo Von’s podcast to promote election fraud conspiracies and joke that the Holocaust never happened, saying, “Six million Jews should die right now, because they cause all the problems in the world.” She’d later call it sarcasm. Either way, it does seem like the kind of humor the Walt Disney Company would frown on.

 
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