"Roseanne" revival with John Goodman, Sara Gilbert and Laurie Metcalf.*

I agree that she will probably be back. Funny how Mel Gibson hasn't been mentioned in this thread.

 

Statement from Michael Fishman (DJ):

 

During the French Revolution, the guillotine was hungry for blood. When the Revolutionaries ran out of political enemies to behead, they turned on themselves.

The same thing happened in the early days of the Bolshevik Revolution. Mob rule is never a good thing, even in situations like this where the target (Roseanne) could have avoided the whole thing by not saying such crazy, divisive things. But I'm concerned when I see hateful, violent comments IN RESPONSE TO Roseanne for what she said. Is that now somehow justified?

All in all, I'm mad at Roseanne for ruining her show and making it easy for them to get rid of her. I'm mad that this has fueled more hate and spite. I'm not mad at ABC, even though I wish there was more equal treatment in their disciplining, but they made a business decision, just like the NFL did. Money talks and racism, real or perceived, is poison.

 

Which leads to the next question.

What happens to the syndication?

 

I agree that innocent people lost their jobs. But I'm not sure if ABC could have taken another action that would have resulted in a better outcome. Here are a couple of hypothetical scenarios:

SCENARIO #1: ABC does nothing. Roseanne continues to make unhinged rants. People start boycotting, advertisers jump ship in droves.....there's spillover boycotts at other Disney properties......the stock price takes a tumble.....Disney loses billions.

SCENARIO #2: ABC fires Roseanne but keeps the show. Ratings tank, Disney ends up canceling the show halfway through Season 2 and everyone loses their job anyway.

It seems to me that Disney/ABC did the least painful (least expensive) scenario: cutting bait before the losses started piling up. I just don't think that there was any was for them to repair the damage.

 

Yup.
With the boycott machine that is social media and the internet, ABC had no other option.

 

Hate speech, racial insults, sexist comments, and anything that could be construed as bigotry would be part of that contract. It's about being incendiary and insulting, not necessarily breaking the law. Two different things. If a celebrity said, "I want to buy a gun and shoot X and kill them," that's an actual threat that breaks the law. If they say "I hate X and think their head is shoved up their ***," then that's just an opinion. Howard Stern has said many times that the reason he's survived this long is because he's very much aware of where the line is and how to avoid crossing it. He can insult and demean and make fun of somebody to a point... but it doesn't descend into something actionable from a legal point of view. (Though he has been fired by quite a few radio stations who didn't appreciate the controversy associated with Stern.)

There are now guidelines in place for all the major networks, SAG-AFTRA, the DGA, the WGA, the PGA, and the unions that forbid certain kinds of behavior from cast & crew -- up to and including sexual harassment. But as has happened recently with Jeffrey Tambor, you also can't have screaming temper-tantrums on a set and reduce another actor to tears. That kinda crap will get you fired. And if you're the lead actor in a show built around you, then it's basically the end of the show.

There are rare occasions where the showrunners figured out a way to replace the lead actor, as with Charlie Sheen on 2-1/2 Men, or with Clayne Crawford on Lethal Weapon. But it's deadly when this kind of thing happens, and it can very easily destroy the delicate creative chemistry between the actors, the writers, and the producers.

 

There is a third scenario. ABC could have made a public statement denouncing the comments and suspended her for a few episodes. Don’t know if it would have worked but that’s another option.

 

Well, I certainly understand saying things out of anger, or not framing your words well, but it takes premeditation to tell a racist joke. You always have that chance to stop yourself. I also understand that people with emotional problems have less of a filter or a sense of judgement. But, I find it very difficult to use mental illness as an excuse for saying things on that level. Think about it this way: accused murderers don't usually get to use insanity as a defense.

 

Though it was the most extreme example, it wasn't the first time that Barr has gone too far with these kinds of inflammatory, racist statements in recent years. She's been crossing over into kooky territory for a while now, so this latest barrage of toxic tweets and the fallout it produced was all too believable, maybe even inevitable. Experienced public figures like Barr know how the game is played and how explosive these kinds of controversies can be, particularly now in the 24 hour news/social media era. Live by the media, die by the media.

 

Well, if Disney buys Fox, it won't go there.

 

Was season 2 in production, wrapped or what?

 

What someone puts on twitter is not their 'personal life'. Especially if they are a famous person with an official blue check next to their name.

 

Yup. She probably figured if she just laid low, it would blow over. But, a little-reported tidbit about this whole thing is that right before she tweeted her apology, she tweeted a conspiracy theory site.

 

I agree, and actually that's what I would have tried. Maybe it still results in a boycott, maybe not. Maybe the cast and writers utilize Roseanne's absence to create an episode condemning what she did? Heck, maybe it wins over America and becomes the most unifying episode of TV history since the MASH finale. Who knows.

Anyway, I kind of feel like ABC bears some responsibility with this debacle, since they were well aware (WELL-A-FREAKING-WARE!!) of Roseanne's instability, and yet they made no effort to rein her in or keep her off Twitter. Their quick reaction this morning shows that they were ill-prepared to deal with the inevitable, which is kind of shocking when you consider how much money was on the line.

 

And, you know this...how? Twitter is the same as Facebook in that respect. People put up their personal crap for anyone who cares to read it.

 

Many celebrities use social media to help promote their "brand". Some of them know what they're doing while others let their handlers take care of it. Others, like Barr, grow unstable and lose their grip.

 

Personal life was traditionally separated from public life until I'm thinking about 20 or so years ago.

I have mixed feelings about what's happening now.

In the early 1980s I attended a lecture sponsored by the Department of Journalism at my university by former CBS president Fred Friendly. He offered up a hypothetical to all of us students -- say you're covering a pro-life/anti-abortion activist and you discover she actually had an abortion herself as a young woman. Do you cover it? IIRC about 80 % or 90 % of the students in the audience raised their hands to say "yes, cover it." He shook his head, looked dismayed and told everyone he thought it was irrelevant to the current discussion and that all things like that were -- leave the gossip and personality stuff to the tabloids and gossip mags.

I didn't actually vote myself -- thinking that it should be more a case-by-case evaluation.

I'm not sure what I think about the way things are now.

As a younger man, say 40+ years ago, I was all for boycotts and hitting them where it counted -- in the bank account.

But now, I wonder where we're going with all of these flash-court, social media judgements. I guess sometimes people deserve what they get, but it sure seems like we're quickly moving into mob-rule territory with all of this and I'm not too sure that's a good thing. People who might not deserve flash-judgment could easily get rolled over before anyone actually knows whether or not they're guilty of anything or not.

Interesting the way media has so incredibly accelerated everything.

 

People were willing to cut Roseanne a great deal of slack for her prior statements, or she wouldn't have gotten on the air in the first place, and wouldn't have gotten such high ratings. But she crossed a line. To some degree, this reminds me of the Al Campanis incident 31 years ago. In that sense, it can be argued that what happened to Roseanne is nothing new. Blatantly racist statements are not going to fly in the entertainment business, and that's been true for decades, regardless of whether there's still racism below the surface of things.

You have no way of knowing that it's permanent or life long. If a celebrity says "one wrong thing" by mistake or slip of the tongue, and is able to show they are genuinely sorry for what they said, I suspect they can be forgiven by the public over time. The public's attention span has probably never been shorter than it is now, in addition.

 

The point was that she is a public person using her official verified account. The tweets are not her private personal business.

 

Well like an alcoholic with a bottle...some personality types shouldn’t have access to things like Twitter. You can’t ban them but they need help like any other addict

 

I guess that's right, but I think a lot of people don't comprehend the distinction, since they're contstantly broadcasting everything about themselves, what they had for lunch, their sexual proclivities, etc., etc. It seems like it overlaps everything.

 

'Roseanne' reruns pulled from multiple channels after star's racist tweet

 

OK...I must be near completely out of touch: what is a Seattle personality type?

 

I'm so glad to hear that Sara Gilbert doesn't share those views... She was so much more effective on The View, anyway.