Roseanne Barr Says She Was Invited to Guest on ‘The Conners’ As A Ghost
As Roseanne Barr claims in the new documentary, Roseanne Is America, per People. “You’re coming back as a ghost.”
Barr, as you might expect, reacted like a classy lady. “You’re asking me to come back to the show that you fucking stole from me and killed my ass,” she allegedly responded. “And now you want me to show up because you got shit fucking ratings and play a ghost.”
Despite the invitation, Barr politely declined due to a prior engagement. “I’m gonna be bowling that fucking week,” she informed producers.
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Roseanne being Roseanne, her ghost story might be the apocryphal musings of an unreliable narrator. Producers for The Conners didn’t respond when People reached out to them for a comment, although executive producer Bruce Helford previously told The Wrap he couldn’t 100 percent rule out a ghost story despite “we aren’t bringing anybody back from the dead.”
Barr is still plenty angry about her dismissal from the Roseanne revival. Despite the sitcom’s success, ABC made the decision to part ways with Barr after she made Ambien-fueled tweets comparing Barack Obama Senior Advisor Valerie Jarrett to the offspring of the “Muslim Brotherhood & Planet of the Apes.” The network called those remarks “abhorrent, repugnant and inconsistent with our values” and cancelled Roseanne before reviving the sitcom as the Barr-less The Conners.
Producers, however, did have to explain what happened to the comedy’s original matriarch. Instead of sending Roseanne off to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, they chose a path that created potential ghost plots for the future. “Within three weeks, they revived the show as The Conners, and of course, they killed off my character Roseanne in an opioid overdose,” Barr complained in the documentary. “Which was staggering because Glenn Quinn, who played Becky’s husband, actually died of an opioid overdose.”
Roseanne Is America is just the latest vehicle for Barr to express her anger over the end of Roseanne. In the past, she’s also blamed co-star Sara Gilbert for not taking her side. After Gilbert distanced herself from Barr’s hate-filled tweets, Barr alleged that it was Gilbert’s apologies that got Roseanne canceled. Barr told Megyn Kelly that Gilbert and ABC executives “were sending a message over the airwaves because they knew I had mental health issues. I thought they wanted me to kill myself.”
Despite the absence of Barr, The Conners became a long-running hit on its own, lasting for seven seasons and more than 100 episodes. In fact, in its final year, its “shit fucking ratings” made The Conners ABC’s most-watched comedy.
