Sara Gilbert was one of the first Roseanne cast members to distance herself from Roseanne Barr’s racist tweets.
Roseanne’s cancellation last week came as a very sudden shock to everyone involved with the show, and prompted several rumors about what ABC might be planning to do as it continues to pick up the pieces—and potentially looks for new positions for the actors, creative team members, and crew members who lost their jobs when Roseanne got the ax. One report claims that the network may attempt to salvage what’s left of the show (and save a lot of jobs at once) by ordering a Roseanne spin-off, centered not around Barr’s matriarch but her daughter, single mom Darlene Conner.
The Hollywood Reporter wrote on Friday that ABC will hold a meeting next week to talk through spin-off ideas, all of which must obey certain criteria: “they have to be without Roseanne Barr and the actress and former head writer of the sitcom would not be able to financially benefit from any new incarnation of the series.” TMZ, meanwhile, indicates that the network might be coalescing around one particular spin-off concept: sources told the gossip site that ABC has been talking to the cast and crew of Roseanne specifically about a new, Darlene-centric show.
Actress Sara Gilbert, who plays Darlene and was an executive producer of the Roseanne revival, was one of the first cast or crew members to distance herself from Roseanne Barr’s supposedly Ambien-induced racist tweets, which got the show cancelled in the first place. As she tweeted at the time, “Roseanne’s recent comments about Valerie Jarrett, and so much more, are abhorrent and do not reflect the beliefs of our cast and crew or anyone associated with our show. I am disappointed in her actions to say the least. This is incredibly sad and difficult for all of us, as we’ve created a show that we believe in, are proud of, and that audiences love—one that is separate and apart from the opinions and words of one cast member.”
“We’re told John Goodman is ‘very interested,’” TMZ says of the potential Roseanne re-reboot. “Our sources say Tom Werner, who produced Roseanne through his company Carsey-Werner, is involved in the effort to reboot the show around Sara.” Such a move would salvage the jobs of the cast, writers, and crew who lost their positions last week with the show’s cancellation—but ABC may very well decide instead to let the Roseanne crew go and disown the show altogether. All traces of the new Roseanne have already been erased from the network’s website, and the original series has also been largely scrubbed from streaming and reruns. (Hulu took the old show off its service, and TV Land, CMT, and the Paramount Network all stopped showing reruns; the series is, however, still available on Amazon Prime.)
