Roseanne Barr is ready to return to the small screen.
The comedian and former star of the eponymous ABC sitcom told Variety that she has a “silly and out there” new series ready to be greenlit for production.
Described as “a cross between the Roseanne show and The Sopranos,” Barr says the new series features “very offensive ideas and a lot of swearing. I live with my daughter and her husband and their six children on a farm. And they have goats running through their house and stuff. It’s based on my life as a farmer in Hawaii. They save America with guns, the Bible, petty crime, and alcoholism. It’s kind of like the Coen brothers thing.”
The untitled series was co-written by Allan Stephan, who told Entertainment Weekly that the new series is “a sitcom about today. Today’s world, what the people are going through, which is something they didn’t want to do or even talk about before Trump was re-elected.”
“It’s not a Trump show by any means,” Stephan clarified, “but it’s certainly about people that want to survive what’s going on in the country.” He called the pilot, “a nice mixture of the old Roseanne and the new Roseanne, but then there’s a side nobody knows… because she gets to actually be herself with no restrictions.”
Barr became one of TV’s biggest stars when Roseanne premiered in 1988. She played the titular character, the wise-cracking, domineering matriarch of a small-town Illinois family, until the original run finale in 1997.
ABC revived the series for a tenth season in 2017 to immense success. But Roseanne 2.0 was canceled just two months after the network renewed it for a second season. In May of 2018, Barr, who has been outspokenly conservative for years, tweeted that President Obama senior advisor Valerie Jarrett was as if “Muslim brotherhood & planet of the apes had a baby.”
While Barr gave interviews apologizing for, explaining, and sometimes doubling down on her comment, ABC re-tooled Roseanne‘s upcoming second season into a new series, The Conners, starring Barr’s screen sister Laurie Metcalf. The Connersremains a hit for ABC heading into its seventh and final season, which will premiere in March.
Teasing the kind of entertainment viewers can expect should Barr’s new show be picked up at another network, the comedian offered, “There’s a scene where I have to strap myself into a corset. My granddaughter helps me, and then I go into town to flirt with all the shopkeepers that are just grotesque people.”
Since being booted from Roseanne, Barr has hosted her own podcast, The Roseanne Barr Podcast, and last year contributed her voice to the DailyWire+ adult animated series Mr. Birchum.
