Stealing the Show

by Joy Press

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  In the fall of 1988, Roseanne Barr became a TV icon. Yet she still felt undermined on her own set, so she threatened to quit. By the end of December, executive producer Matt Williams was sent packing. Jeff Harris, a writer who’d worked on the sitcom Diff’rent Strokes, replaced him, but things didn’t exactly settle down. Another figure had arrived to convulse the set: Tom Arnold.

  Barr had met Arnold at a comedy club in Minneapolis in 1983. In My Lives, she writes that they did coke together; then she watched him do an act in which he killed fish and set them on fire. Arnold “had this undercurrent of uncomfortableness . . . like a guy who wants to behave but just can’t seem to help himself,” she recalls, “a guy who’s learned to live with always being sorry for something.” The two became best friends, and he started writing jokes for her. Sometimes they even dressed like twins.

  Instead of being cast as Dan, Arnold ended up playing Dan’s sidekick, Arnie. Now Barr was leaving her husband for Arnold and insisting that the comedian also be hired to the writing staff, which had been decimated in a wave of firings, just as Barr had threatened. Norma Safford Vela, a writer on season two, says a producer gave her a rough assignment: “Go teach Tom Arnold to write.”

  Although Barr had a great deal of input into Roseanne scripts and story lines and, over the years, performed many of a showrunner’s tasks, she did not spend a lot of time in the writers’ room as episodes were being hammered out. She believed that Arnold understood her working-class characters and would be a good ambassador for her in the process—but the show’s writers gave him the runaround. “We all thought he was one hundred percent talent-free,” Safford Vela explains. Barr, she continues, “was very upset because she thought we didn’t respect her choices, and it’s like, well, no, we just don’t respect this choice. You have one billion good ideas, but this one is shit. He is destructive and he is bad.”

  Safford Vela says Barr “was great with the rest of the cast; the crew loved her. It was really just fighting for power and the voice of the show. . . . That season got ugly. But the show still got to number one.” The level of backstabbing intrigue resembled the royal court of Henry VIII. Writer Barbara Klaus once described a script meeting in which Arnold and Barr belligerently provoked their haters: “She straddled him in a chair, looked into his eyes, and emitted a belch that echoed through the soundstages.” According to Barr, when Jeff Harris attempted to fire Arnold, he shouted, “I’m not fired! You’re fired, fucker!” Arnold then marched over to Barr and urged her to stand up to Harris and show him who was boss. “This is not a fucking democracy. It’s a Queendom,” he said.

  Barr and Arnold married in January 1990. Two months later, Harris officially departed, announcing in a full-page ad in Daily Variety, “I have chosen not to return to the show next season. Instead, my wife and I have decided to share a vacation in the relative peace and quiet of Beirut.”

  “It was a little tough to talk to Roseanne at that point because she was mostly under Tom’s influence and just really struggling with her own mental health,” recalls Safford Vela. “And who wouldn’t be, with that much change in her life? She had everything she had worked for suddenly handed to her, and it was not the way she had imagined.” She not only had a hit show but she was also shooting a major motion picture (She-Devil, an adaptation of Fay Weldon’s wickedly funny feminist novel, in which she costarred with Meryl Streep). Meanwhile, Barr was embroiled in that amour fou with Arnold, who, adding to the chaos, had a major drug problem. Also, her kids, plunked down in the middle of a Hollywood tabloid nightmare, were acting out.

  “When you have a huge success, there are aftershocks of it in the real world and in your family,” Roseanne tells me now. “I remember I was filming one of the first episodes and I got a call saying, ‘Your daughter has run away.’ On tape day. They were always fucking with me on tape day! And I’m in every scene,” she says, screwing up her face at the memory. “Having indiscriminate sex . . . it was a lot for my family to take.” By the spring of the show’s first season, daughter Jessica was in rehab, and the National Enquirer had inadvertently reunited Barr with Brandi, the child she had given up for adoption as a teenager.

  One fledgling writer who found opportunity amid the rubble of the Roseanne set was Joss Whedon. Whedon showed up on his first day well aware of the backstage drama, expecting some kind of pep talk from Barr to instill loyalty. Instead, she told the writers that if she found anyone talking to the tabloids they’d all be fired.

  Despite this discouraging atmosphere, Whedon kept his head down and wrangled credits for six scripts on season two, a great haul for a novice TV writer. He has said that Tom Arnold championed his work, showing it to Barr. She took Whedon to lunch and asked him how a twenty-five-year-old guy understood the character of a midwestern mom so well. Among his scripts was “Chicken Hearts,” in which Roseanne has to suck up to a patronizing teenage boss because she needs the job, and “The Little Sister,” an episode that Whedon says originally addressed abortion. The initial idea was that Jackie would drunkenly reveal to niece Darlene that she’d had a termination—a bold move in 1989, the year the Supreme Court ruling on Webster v. Reproductive Health Services upheld a Missouri state ban on the use of public employees and facilities for performing abortions. A woman’s right to choose was a topic that the avowedly feminist Whedon could sink his teeth into. Days later, network pushback transformed Jackie’s abortion into a miscarriage; the final version of the script bore no trace of that radical plotline. Instead, Jackie drunkenly confronts Roseanne because she doesn’t support her sister’s desire to become a police officer. “Welcome to my dream and my first heartbreak,” Whedon has said.

  Whedon had a little more fun with “Brain-Dead Poets Society,” in which tomboy Darlene is forced to read her own poem aloud at school culture night, and Roseanne shares with Darlene her own youthful desire to be a writer (and her love of Sylvia Plath). When Darlene finally gets onstage in a peach dress, looking pale and awkward, she transforms before our eyes from smart-ass kid to the melancholy nonconformist she will become in future seasons: “To whom it concerns / I just turned thirteen / too short to be quarterback / too plain to be queen.” As she watches from the audience, Roseanne’s eyes fill with tears; a moment later, she leaps up to snap a photo of her mortified daughter.

  Although he was getting a chance to hone his skills, Whedon nevertheless felt frustrated when his poetry episode was revamped, as was par for the course in television. “He couldn’t believe we would rewrite that script because, you know, he had done a really good job,” recalls Safford Vela. “I said, ‘Look, this is television, and this is what will happen on every show until you run the show. In the meantime, go write your own stuff. Do you have an idea for anything?’ ” He mentioned an idea for a vampire movie. Safford Vela told him, “Focus on that and don’t worry about this show.” Whedon spent the rest of his contract working on a draft of the screenplay that would become Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

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  Now firmly in command of the series, Arnold and Barr were on a high. It was to be short-lived. Roseanne producer Tom Werner, who owned the San Diego Padres baseball team, invited his star to sing the national anthem at Working Women’s Night. Her screeched rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner” sounded “like a yodeler singing through a tubal ligation,” Barr would snark years later. She ended the botched song by grabbing her crotch and spitting—a cheeky but misjudged attempt to satirize macho ballplayers.

  A deafening roar of disgust filled the San Diego stadium; within hours it had spread to the rest of the country. Radio talk show listeners called for a boycott of her show, the New York Daily News renamed her “Roseanne Barr-f,” and President George H. W. Bush deemed it all “disgraceful.” An entrepreneur even tried to capitalize on the backlash with the Roseanne Hate Club, advertising BAN ROSEANNE T-shirts in Rolling Stone.

  The media uproar didn’t dent the show’s ratings, though. Barr’s chutzpah played well with her
audience. The entertainment industry wasn’t so impressed, however, and the series continued to be snubbed by the Emmy Awards. While Murphy Brown racked up the statuettes, Roseanne didn’t win any of the awards for which it was nominated. Barr herself would win the lead-actress Emmy only a single time (in 1993), whereas Candice Bergen won so many for Murphy (five) that she eventually withdrew her name from consideration.

  Yet Roseanne just got sharper and funnier as the show moved into its third season. A whole new squad of writers was hired, among them a very young Amy Sherman-Palladino (then still Amy Sherman). “They were starting fresh, and they needed chicks,” says Sherman-Palladino, especially chicks who could write for the daughter characters Becky and Darlene, both growing into teenage complexity. Sherman and her writing partner Jennifer Heath were inexperienced and cheap, a winning combo. Their first introduction to the Arnolds was at a gathering at the couple’s beach house on the day after the “Star-Spangled” debacle. “They had taped every single newscast about it,” Sherman-Palladino has said. “So we just sat there and watched, like, four hours of people saying how Roseanne was a horrible person for singing the national anthem.”

  Bob Myer had taken over as the head writer, and Sherman-Palladino says she learned a great deal from him. “That’s where I learned to make the small big and make the big small,” she says—like dedicating an entire episode to the tiny trauma of Darlene’s getting her first period. Becky and Darlene—as played by Alicia “Lecy” Goranson and Sara Gilbert, respectively—really came to the fore during this era of Roseanne, with story lines that went far beyond the standard TV kid tropes. Darlene plunged into adolescent depression, while Becky sought birth control and later got pregnant. Contraception and teen pregnancy were very thorny topics in the eighties and nineties, when the religious right and Republicans (via laws such as the 1981 Adolescent Family Life Act, popularly known as the Chastity Act) successfully pushed to fund abstinence-only education rather than Sex Ed. Sherman-Palladino and Heath’s Emmy-nominated episode “A Bitter Pill to Swallow” has Becky enlisting Aunt Jackie to help her ask Roseanne for contraception. The look that passes between the adult sisters is astounding, cycling from shock through horror to fear and finally to acceptance. At the gynecologist’s office, Roseanne worries that her little girl no longer needs her. “Of course she needs you,” Jackie counters. “She needs you to pay for the pills!”

  The series often played up the shtick of Roseanne Conner as a “bad mom”—a persona Barr helped propagate and that would pick up speed in pop culture decades later, in books such as Ayelet Waldman’s 2009 memoir Bad Mother and the 2016 movie Bad Moms, with women coolly wearing the term as a badge of honor. A refusal of the whole “having it all” con, it became a way of pushing back against the guilt and unrealistic expectations of perfect motherhood. Why pretend you’d rather change a baby’s diaper than kick back with a margarita? As Waldman wrote, “We shrug at the orange Cheetos dust smeared across our children’s mouths . . . happy to confess our sins because we are confident that those who come closest, and with the most sanctimony, to emulating the self-effacing, self-sacrificing, soft-spoken, cheerful, infinitely patient Good Mother are the real Bad Mothers.”

  Roseanne offered a rare public admission—in the midst of the religious right’s family-values crusade—that parenthood could be a rotten, soul-sapping affair, especially when you throw a low-wage job or two into the mix. Roseanne is often sarcastic and dismissive to her kids. (When DJ asks why she’s so mean, she replies, “Because I hate kids . . . and I’m not your real mom!”) In the third season, she gets into a pissing match with new next-door neighbor Kathy, an upwardly mobile helicopter mom who ticks off Roseanne for not knowing where DJ went with her son. “I have three kids and a job, so I can’t be everywhere,” Roseanne snaps back. “I gotta trust my kids, and they’re still alive, so I have obviously done something right.”

  Despite this bluster, Roseanne never actually neglects her kids (although, there is one episode where the family forgets DJ is playing hide-and-seek and finds him hours later, asleep in a kitchen cupboard). She doesn’t spend a heap of time cleaning the house, and nightly dinners lean more toward hot dogs and beans than lovingly prepared pot roasts. Yet we see her character struggling every week to figure out how to be a decent mom while making a living and not entirely letting go of her sense of self.

  “I had three kids, and that’s how I lived,” Barr tells me earnestly. “I wanted to be a different kind of mother in my real life and on TV. I was kind of obsessed with it because, as a kid, Donna Reed—well, all the mothers on TV—were not like what I knew.” Those classic TV mothers were horrible, she says, “because they were always making the husband look like a dolt. What do they call it? The fist in the velvet glove.” Whereas the Roseanne character “was kind of like my grandma. She was a real Jewish matriarch, and she ruled with a wooden spoon. You did not want to get hit on the upper thigh with that thing.”

  Of course, Roseanne Conner was not written as a Jewish woman; that would have made her family seem too exotic and outsiderish, at least from a network perspective. The history of television is one in which generations of Jewish writers put their words in WASPy characters’ mouths. Before Roseanne had even aired, Barr vented to the New York Times that she was struggling with Hollywood’s tendency to whitewash reality. “We’re raising our kids as Jews/anarchists, so that’s kind of what I’d like to have my TV family be. But, yeah, this is TV.”

  Roseanne nevertheless threaded cultural politics through the series in relatively seamless ways. There was the season three Halloween episode in which DJ wants to dress as a witch; a horrified Dan tries to persuade his son to trade his gender-bending costume for an ax-murderer outfit. Meanwhile, Roseanne, clad as a bearded dude, ends up at a bar where the local guys mistake her for a real man. “It was awesome!” she trills to Jackie. “It reminds me of that movie where the lady hangs out with these gorillas and they accept her as one of their own!” But Roseanne can’t help herself and ends up instigating a fight with the guys in the bar; Dan arrives just in time to save her from getting clobbered. “Leave him alone—he’s my husband!” Dan shouts, mocking his own gender rigidity.

  Two of Barr’s siblings are gay, and in later seasons, the show would introduce several major gay characters, including Roseanne’s friend Nancy (played by Sandra Bernhard). The infamous “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” episode, cowritten by gay staff writers Stan Zimmerman and James Berg, nonchalantly challenged homophobia, even as antigay ballot initiatives were circulating in almost a dozen states (and three years before Ellen DeGeneres’s infamous coming-out episode aired on the same network). ABC considered shelving or censoring an episode in which Roseanne visits a gay bar and is kissed by a lesbian (played by Mariel Hemingway). Barr and Arnold threatened to take the show to another network, and ABC ultimately ran the episode with a parental warning. The night before it aired, Barr mocked the idea that her own network thought it “shocking to see a woman kiss another woman but not shocking to see a woman raped, mutilated, and shot every two seconds” on television. ABC officials said that of the one hundred calls they received in response to the episode, 75 percent of them were positive.

  During the presidential campaign of 1992, while the world was waiting for Murphy Brown to sucker punch Dan Quayle, Barr bragged to the Los Angeles Times that she found that kind of overt engagement in politics tedious. “We’re not going to talk about who the Conners are going to vote for. I think people would turn us off real quick,” she said, noting that her television family didn’t trust the left or right wing. “They’re somewhere in the middle of it all, not knowing what anything stands for anymore. So really what they do is go to work and come home to be with their family, and try to make do.” Added Tom Arnold, “We don’t do jokes about Dan Quayle. He won’t watch our show because it would be too painful, because it’s reality.”

  The Conners’ reality encompassed domestic abuse: Roseanne’s sister, Jackie, a former cop, confesses that
her seemingly nice boyfriend Fisher is beating her. “I remember going to write that and thinking, ‘Oh shit, how do we make that funny?’ ” says DeAnn Heline, who began writing for Roseanne with her partner Eileen Heisler in season five. “That was the great thing about Roseanne—you could tackle any topic and go to dark places. And those actors were so good. I remember we had written a scene where Dan is in jail because he beat up Jackie’s boyfriend, and Darlene comes to post bail. Darlene just goes, ‘Well well well well well.’ That got a three-minute laugh, just from her saying that. That is when writing is most satisfying, is when you can do something real.”

  Soon after the domestic-abuse plotline aired, Barr would publicly accuse her own father of molesting her. (Her parents denied it, and she later partly retracted the claim.) This trauma echoed through “Wait Till Your Father Gets Home,” an episode written by Sherman-Palladino later that season about the death of Roseanne and Jackie’s father. Although she feels toxic with rage at his memory, Roseanne ends the episode by venting her grievances over his casket, in a speech Barr says she wrote herself. “Thank you for your humor,” she mutters in conclusion. “I loveyougoodbye.”

  Sherman-Palladino basks in the quality of scripts from that era. “Roseanne had banned the studio and the network [executives] from the show, so we never saw them; they weren’t at table reads. I think they were allowed to come to the shows, but they had to stay in the greenroom; they just sat there. You didn’t have the bullshit interference and the stupid buzzwords of stakes and story engine and these idiotic words that they latch on to that make them feel like they’re giving you a note,” she sputters. “It was a pure experience.” (And one that would set Sherman-Palladino up for disappointment and confrontations with studio suits for decades to come.)

  Barr says now that her main wish was to “break through as many things as I could. And I really had the writers who could do it, too.” But while they were finessing the scripts, she says she was the one called to account. “I would have to be the one who would stand there in front of the network censor.” His name was Neil Conrad and, says Barr, “He was extremely conservative. But if I could make him laugh, he’d say okay. It was kind of like my family—if you could make them laugh, you could say anything.” Conrad proved his sense of humor in a cameo, appearing as himself at the end of an episode about DJ’s erections. Roseanne impishly tries to find an expression acceptable to him: “What about ‘pitching a trouser tent’? ‘Bootin’ up the hard drive’? ‘Popping a wheelie’?” Conrad’s feigned outrage delights her.