Roseanne Barr will no longer headline the ABC sitcom she made famous, but the show will go on in the aftermath of the comedian’s Twitter scandal. Less than one month after ABC canceled Barr’s top-rated sitcom reboot, the network announced it was bringing back the series without its famous star.
Now, an insider tells Closer Weekl y that while all of Roseanne Barr’s former co-stars will reunite for the upcoming ABC spinoff, The Conners , some of them still feel bad about the fact that the show’s matriarch won’t be a part of the new series.
The source told Closer that most of the co-stars “feel sorry for Roseanne.”
“They didn’t like what she said, but she never said those things on the set,” the insider explained.
Roseanne Barr was fired by ABC in late May after she made a racist comment about former White House aide Valerie Jarrett on Twitter. At the time, several of Barr’s heartbroken co-stars, including her TV kids Sara Gilbert and Michael Fishman, denounced her actions on Twitter. Barr later called her co-stars out for not having her back, then later said she forgave them.
The fate of Barr’s character has not yet been revealed for The Conners spinoff, but in the Season 10 finale of the original show, Roseanne Conner was battling an opioid dependency and headed for a serious surgery. Many fans assume the Roseanne character will either be in a rehab or killed off when the new show debuts.
ABC’s announcement for The Conners made it clear that something has changed for the TV family since viewers last saw them. The network’s synopsis for The Conners reads as follows.
“After a sudden turn of events, the Conners are forced to face the daily struggles of life in Lanford in a way they never have before.”
Many Roseanne fans took the description to mean that Barr’s iconic character will be killed off when The Conners spinoff picks up, and the insider told C loser Weekly it will be explained quickly.
“They don’t want to make Roseanne’s absence an ongoing storyline. They want a clean break.”
Roseanne Barr has publicly apologized for her online actions that led to the demise of her hit sitcom. Barr also agreed to step away from the TV franchise that made her a household name so that she could save the jobs of 200 cast and crew members.
“That was a major surprise,” the insider said of Barr’s agreement to give up all financial stakes in the spinoff series. “No one really thought she would go that quietly.”
