re: #165 scottslemmons

The producers or ABC itself should’ve required Roseanne to shut down her Twitter account. They had to have known something like this could happen — especially since she’s kept tweeting racist shit over and over and over — and they should’ve taken some serious steps to protect their investment in the show.

re: #166 goddamnedfrank

I don’t care about what they were trying to do I care about what they did. They used these cases as thinly developed foils intended to humanize and rehabilitate the racist Trump supporting main character. The entire project was designed from its inception to elevate the cohesiveness of white family members above all other ethical and moral considerations. It was one big dysfunctional Thanksgiving dinner, where everyone fights and argues but realizes they’re family in the end . The moral was how that realization and reconciliation *trumps* the actual violence inherent in the systemic, institutional racism that the real Roseanne Barr champions. The entire endeavor was a toxic whitewash and the real Roseanne’s tweets today and the right’s reaction to the show’s cancellation incinerate any notion that Gilbert’s ill advised Pollyanna attempt to advance or heal the national divide utterly failed if for no other reason than you can’t reliably ally with monsters.

re: #168 JordanRules

The alt right trolls that we track here have been spewing dangerous racist rhetoric, vile conspiracy theories and the like for years too and I don’t think anybody is hard-pressed to support their platform. I don’t get why she’d be different. It sends a number of horrible messages to everyone and is particularly shitty to those who are her behavior threatens.

They should have done a show without her. That show with her is not some magical talisman to repair broken parts of the electorate.

Instead of cancelling the show outright, ABC, Carsey-Werner, and Gilbert should have done a Valerie/The Hogan Family, fired Roseanne from the series, and killed Roseanne Conner off for the beginning of the second season. It probably wouldn’t have lasted past another season and I don’t know if the rest of the cast would have been down for that, but it would have been an old-college-try attempt to divorce the continuation from Roseanne’s IRL awfulness.