The Inside Story of How ‘Roseanne’ Was Cancelled

After Roseanne Barr’s racist tweet on Tuesday morning, it reportedly didn’t take long for ABC executives to decide to cancel her sitcom.

The Rosanne reboot was cancelled on Tuesday morning after Barr spent the night on Twitter, promoting conspiracy theories and making racist claims. One tweet in particular about former Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett put her over the edge, and ABC Entertainment President Channing Dungey announced the cancellation hours later.

“Roseanne’s Twitter statement is abhorrent, repugnant and inconsistent with our values, and we have decided to cancel her show,” Dungey’s statement read.

Many in the entertainment industry described themselves as pleasantly surprised by the move. While Barr’s tweet was undoubtedly offensive, it wasn’t her first step over the line. The actress has a long history of racist, inflammatory and conspiratorial statements online. According to a new report by CNN Money, ABC executives were already nearing their wits’ end with Barr before Tuesday’s controversy.

Sources inside of Disney and ABC said that the company’s top brass were already frustrated with Barr’s use of Twitter. In their minds, Tuesday’s racist outburst was either the third or fourth major problem she had caused since returning to the company. Seeing as it was the worst one they’d dealt with yet, they decided amongst themselves that they had had enough.

An insider described Barr’s tweets as “unsurvivable,” adding: “enough was enough.”

Barr reportedly got word of the cancellation by phone shortly before it was announced. She was apologetic on the phone, by which time she had already tweeted an apology to Jarrett. She was told on the phone that a cancellation was very possible, as executives were already certain that no amount of apologizing would even the scale for Barr.

“There was no way to come back from this,” a source said.

Most of her co-workers weren’t so lucky, as producers and cast members found out about the decision along with the rest of the world through the news.

Some inside of ABC are reportedly feeling proud of the unprofitable decision to cancel Roseanne, though others are still wondering how Barr got back on the air in the first place. Her expressions of racism go back about a decade on Twitter alone, and has often promised to keep her thoughts to herself or stay off of Twitter altogether.

Insiders say that ABC executives had optimistically believed her on each of those occasions before. However, on Tuesday, they saw the pattern for what it was and decided to pull the plug on the reboot.