Interesting analysis on Roseanne
Brendan O’Neill at Spiked writes about three things re Rosanne:
1) Her tweet was racist as hell. It wasn’t a joke. It wasn’t ‘un-PC’. It wasn’t a political remark that got a bit too spicy. It was racist. Barr likened Valerie Jarrett, an African-American woman who worked as a political adviser to Obama, to an ape. That is racism. She tweeted: ‘muslim brotherhood & planet of the apes had a baby = vj [Valerie Jarrett].’ So she was repeating both an alt-right cesspit internet conspiracy theory – that Jarrett, and probably Obama too, were effectively agents of the Muslim Brotherhood charged with Islamifying America – and also comparing a black woman to a creature from Planet of the Apes. Nuts and nasty all in one. What an idiot.
Yep offensive as hell.
2) ABC is within its rights to cancel shows. This is what has happened to Barr: her recently resurrected sitcom Roseanne has been pulled. The president of ABC Entertainment described Barr’s Twitter comments as ‘abhorrent, repugnant and inconsistent with our values’ and said ‘we have decided to cancel her show’.
Their studio, their decision. But what puzzles me is that different platforms are now saying they refuse to screen episodes already broadcast. That seems a huge over-reaction. Does one tweet really mean an entire TV series can never ever be viewed again?
3) The unrestrained glee with which the liberal media and Twitterati have greeted the cancellation of Roseanne is not about Barr’s comments on Jarrett. Or more accurately, it isn’t only about that. They’re delighted primarily because they hate Barr. They loathe that she is an extraordinarily popular comedienne who bristles at and mocks the liberal elite. She hates Hillary. She has said positive things about Trump, the greatest no-no in LA. And her rebooted show plonked in millions of Americans’ living rooms a working-class family in which the matriarch – Roseanne – voted for Trump and, worse, likes him because he ‘talked about jobs’, as she said in the opening episode that got 18million viewers.
A good analysis.