NEW YORK (CelebrityAccess) — On Tuesday, broadcaster ABC abruptly announced that it had canceled the revival of the sitcom “Roseanne” after the show’s star Roseanne Barr went on a vitriolic conspiracy-filled rant on Twitter.
“Roseanne’s Twitter statement is abhorrent, repugnant and inconsistent with our values, and we have decided to cancel her show,” Channing Dungey, president of ABC Entertainment said in a statement released just hours after Barr’s latest round of Twitter posts. That was soon followed by an announcement that ICM Partners dropped Barr as a client.
In an early morning series of Twitter posts on Tuesday, Barr promulgated a number of easily disproven conspiracy theories, including claims that Chelsea Clinton was married to a nephew of billionaire George Soros, who Barr accused of trying to foment “the overthrow of us constitutional republic by buying/backing candidates 4 local district attorney races who will ignore US law & favor ‘feelings’ instead-and call everyone who is alarmed by that ‘racist’.”
She then compounded the issue by appearing to suggest that former advisor to Valerie Jarrett, who was an advisor to former President Barack Obama. In the tweet, Barr, wrote: “muslim brotherhood & planet of the apes had a baby=vj.”
Barr later claimed that the tweet was a “joke” and then, after arousing the social mediaverse against her and ABC, she issued a more formal apology and announced that she was leaving Twitter.
“I apologize to Valerie Jarrett and to all Americans,” Barr tweeted. “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.”
Prior to ABC’s announcement of the show’s cancellation, head writer and comedian Wanda Sykes announced via Twitter that she was not returning to the show after Barr’s inflammatory Tweets.
ICM Partners signed Barr just prior to the revival of “Roseanne.”
“We are all greatly distressed by the disgraceful and unacceptable tweet from Roseanne Barr this morning,” the agency’s leadership said in an internal memo to company employees, according to Deadline Hollywood. “What she wrote is antithetical to our core values, both as individuals and as an agency. Consequently, we have notified her that we will not represent her. Effective immediately, Roseanne Barr is no longer a client.”
While this series of tweets was the latest for Barr, they certainly weren’t the first. Since the show was revived in March, Barr’s Twitter feed has been rife with a variety of conspiracy theories, including that the Clintons were concealing details of the murder of Seth Rich, the Democratic National Committee employee who was shot in Washington, and “Pedogate” a purported connection between the Clintons and a ring of pedophiles operating out of a pizza parlor in Washington.
“Roseanne” which originally aired for 9 seasons before being canceled in 1997, was revived in March with many of the original cast. The show enjoyed strong ratings earning 19 million viewers an episode, according to Nielsen, prompting ABC to renew the series for a second season before today’s decision to pull the plug.
