Today, I discuss how silly Roseanne Barr’s complaints over her character’s death on The Conners is.
Knowledge Waits is a feature where I just share some bit of pop culture history that interests me that doesn’t quite fit into the other features.
Recently, while, naturally, promoting a new TV special talking about how she was “canceled” (so canceled that she has her own new TV special), Roseanne Barr continued her complaints over how her character from Roseanne was killed off in the first episode of The Conners spinoff of Roseanne. She said (among other things), “it didn’t faze them to murder [Roseanne]. They s–t on my contribution to television and the show itself.”
When the actual death occurred back in 2018, she was even more detailed of the critique, “We regret that ABC chose to cancel ‘Roseanne’ by killing off the Roseanne Conner character. That it was done through an opioid overdose lent an unnecessary grim and morbid dimension to an otherwise happy family show.”
It’s just such an absurd point. Having Roseanne Conner accidentally overdose on prescription pills WOULD have been a really weird way to kill off the character, if the show hadn’t just COMPLETELY set the concept up in one of the final episodes of Roseanne Season 10, back when Roseanne Barr was partially in charge of the show still!
In Roseanne Season 10’s penultimate episode, “Netflix & Pill,” we learn that Roseanne’s knee pain has been so bad that she has been taking opiods to handle it, including stashing pills all over the house, and using other people’s prescriptions to get by. In other words, the EXACT SCENARIO that leads to people accidentally dying from overdoses in real life.
So to have a plot that was set up in the second-to-last episode of Season 10 (with the finale of Season 10 leading into Roseanne’s surgery itself) be the reason why Roseanne died? It was totally logical.
And after Dan Conner (John Goodman) freaks out when he sees that the prescription pills Roseanne was using had another woman’s name on it, he put a sign on his truck blaming the woman, Marcy Bellinger, for Roseanne’s death. Marcy (guest star Mary Steenburgen) visits the Conners and rails at Dan, explaining, “Nobody can afford their meds. We all help each other. When Sally Benson needed Lipitor for her husband’s cholesterol, they got some from Maria Ramirez, and they gave her the anxiety meds she needed for her son because they dropped her insurance. Rosie needed pain pills. I had some, so I gave them to her.”
Dan then tells her that she’s part of a drug ring, and she retorts, “You know what, Dan? You can judge. But Roseanne called me. She told me that her knee wasn’t healing up fast enough and I was the only person she could turn to. She said that she needed those pain pills to get back to work ’cause you guys were running out of money. Don’t you try to put this off on me.”
Dan then tells her that she gave Roseanne the pills, she died, so he still thinks Marcy killed her.
Then Darlene tells him to stop, as they found a stash of pills in another woman’s name, as well. Marcy finishes, “I never would have given them to her. if I knew she had a problem. I know what it’s like to…to have that problem, so…I just…I’m sorry.”
Dan ultimately forgives her.
So how in the world was that NOT handled well? And, again, it was all based on a plot that was introduced at the end of the revival season that Roseanne Barr was in charge of! Her complaints make no sense.
Feel free to e-mail me at my all-new, much shorter e-mail address, brian@poprefs.com, for suggestions for shows for us to do in future installments!
This is a good and recent example of how, as journalist/commentator/podcaster Michael Hobbes has written about in detail, about how “cancel culture” is a canard and something “certain media” exaggerates. The bottom line is that for most famous and/or wealthy people who suffered some kind of indignity or reaction to their own actions or comments by others, they were not “vanished,” ruined, or destroyed. They just suffered the inconvenience of getting richer a little slower and having to be less public for a while.
Roseanne Barr was a wealthy and successful comedian/actress when she was fired from ROSEANNE after season 10. Unless there was a specific clause in her contract which allowed the network to fire her for her comments immediately (i.e. a “moral clause” which usually only religious institutions use), Barr had to be paid or compensated for the network terminating her contract (something the network would have been willing to do in order to fire her and move the show on without her; which paid off since THE CONNERS is still thriving). Even afterward, as the star/co-producer of the show, Barr continued to profit from residuals (including of the 10th season, which is included in syndication packages with channels such as COZI, a non-cable digital station which has rerun ROSEANNE for about a decade). If anything, adding an extra season would have made those residuals better.
And now, naturally, Barr has chosen the audience willing to pay her seven figures (perhaps eight) or more to do a new “comedy” special. Wow, so she had to wait a few extra years to earn more millions. What a tragedy! If she burns through her salaries after decades of acting, comedy, etc. so fast that she was really hard up financially after being fired, which I doubt, that was her own fault, not “cancel culture.”
Incidentally, she still has some pals in Hollywood. Bill Maher, at least, went on record in one episode of REAL TIME as still being her friend. Of course, he’s the face of “Conserva-Dems” who sporadically issues a borderline racist or “unenlightened” comment on air himself.
I agree with the subject of the article, but wanted to reply that it is only yet another example of “cancel culture” being a fake scandal that is being used as a distraction for things that actually are happening.