‘Roseanne’ Canceled: TV Queen Apologizes for Shot at Valerie Jarrett, Is Fired Anyway

Roseanne Barr is now off ABC’s television lineup after a controversial tweet of hers targeted former Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett.

On Tuesday, Barr leveled a scathing blow. “[M]uslim brotherhood & planet of the apes had a baby=vj,” Barr tweeted in a comment on a story about Jarrett.

She deleted the tweet and said she was sorry for it. “I apologize. I am now leaving Twitter,” she initially wrote.

“I apologize to Valerie Jarrett and to all Americans,” she continued minutes later. “I am truly sorry for making a bad joke about her politics and her looks. I should have known better. Forgive me — my joke was in bad taste.”

On Tuesday afternoon, however, ABC canceled the show via a public statement.

“Roseanne’s Twitter statement is abhorrent, repugnant and inconsistent with our values, and we have decided to cancel her show,” ABC Entertainment President Channing Dungey said in a statement.

Barr had relaunched “Roseanne,” one of the most successful sitcoms of all time, which dominated TV ratings in the 1980s. Prior to that, she was a stand-up comic beloved by working-class Americans in the 1980s.

Her unafraid, non-PC hit TV show riled up critics across the political divide.

Roseanne cast the lead character of her revived show “Roseanne” as an unapologetic Trump supporter. She explained her decision to Israeli TV reporter Dana Weiss.

“I didn’t have Roseanne the character become a Trump supporter because I am,” Barr said. “I had her become a Trump supporter because she’s a working-class person, and it is the working class that elected Donald Trump. So, in being true to that little demographic, I had to do it.”

Her show’s roaring success, driven in part by its strong middle American viewership, inspired a comeback for other working-class television series, such as Tim Allen’s “Last Man Standing.”

That tide may be stemmed back now with the latest news of Roseanne Barr’s firing at ABC.

The surge in blue-collar sitcoms came amid the announcement that former President Barack Obama had gotten a new Netflix production deal.

The blue-collar tide of sitcoms may be stemmed back with the latest news of Roseanne Barr’s firing at ABC.

“We want to tell stories. This [Netflix deal] becomes a platform. We are interested in lifting people up and identifying people [who are] doing amazing work,” Obama said at a Las Vegas tech conference, as reported by Business Insider.

“We are all human. I know this sounds trite, and yet, right now globally, we have competing narratives,” he added.

The politically savvy television star Roseanne Barr, once a vocal Trump critic, had fiercely criticized the Obama Netflix production deal.

“I don’t think any president should go from WH to producing big media 4 public consumption,” Barr wrote on Twitter. “It’s an unholy alliance. Leave show biz 2 professionals — altho i do think going from show biz 2 WH is Ok — I might do it one day, then retire from both.”

Whether it’s Obama’s inking a production deal or Roseanne Barr’s rebooting a smash hit TV series, one thing is clear: The lines between entertainment and politics have never been more blurred.

Barr, who has an eclectic set of political views, filed to run for president in 2012 on the Green Party ticket. She came in second to Jill Stein. “Who’s Jill Stein?” she once joked in her ABC revival of “Roseanne.”

In 2016, Barr made waves by revealing she had voted for Donald Trump.

The president called Barr in March and congratulated her on the smash success of “Roseanne”: The revival of her show drew 18.2 million viewers on its opening night. She revealed some of their conversation to “Good Morning America.”

“Well, you know, we just kinda had a private conversation, but we talked about a lot of things, and he’s just happy for me,” Barr said.

Roseanne Barr understood ratings so well that her show’s revival was on track to become a smash hit. When it comes to Hollywood and Trump, however, ratings are not enough.

It’s revealing Hollywood would target “Roseanne” for an abrupt cancellation so soon after millions suspected political motivations were behind the pulling of the plug of Allen’s “Last Man Standing.” “Duck Dynasty,” another favorite of conservatives and working-class Americans, drew similar media backlash.

Breakout hit shows that sympathetically portray the conservative point of view are what progressive media outlets fear the most: The Left will give the Right the low ground of politics, but progressives truly understand, as the late Andrew Breitbart once put it, “Politics is downstream of culture.”

Kyle Becker is a content writer and producer with LifeZette. Follow him on Twitter.