The latest iteration of the sitcom featuring a middle American family was seen as a barometer of the tastes and perhaps even growing influence of Trump voters on American pop culture. The show drew large but diminishing audiences two decades after it went off the air, which set off a series of think pieces on what its popularity demonstrated about the state of America and Americans. Upon the show’s cancellation, media on the right weighed in largely with newsy posts about the Twitter remarks and subsequent sacking. Some longer, more substantive evaluation on the right pointed out that: A) Barr’s comments were abhorrent; and B) they were nothing new.
David French at
National Review outlined how the actress and vocal Trump supporter’s venom sprayed every which way in his post “
Roseanne and the High Cost of Embracing Craziness.” “If Roseanne Barr is a poster child for anything, she’s a poster child for cultural brokenness,” French writes. Barr is batty even by internet standards, French points out, as she’s a birther, a 9/11 truther, and every other form of -
er. “First, ABC shouldn’t have brought her back. She was, quite obviously, one of the more toxic and troubled personalities in American public life,” French writes. “Second, Trump World shouldn’t have embraced her new show.”
Remember when President Trump
called Roseanne to congratulate her on her ratings? I know that Republicans are starved for Republican-friendly television, but can we ever reach a time when the stakes are low enough to draw lines based on character? I know people voted for the low-character president because of the Flight 93 election and all that. I know folks turned out for Roy Moore because of judges. But where’s the sitcom emergency necessitating the love for Roseanne?
French then addressed the residual question that simmers on the right: What about the other side?
Third, hypocrisy and double standards abound. So, where are the lines for acceptable speech? Even now, Twitter is lighting up with examples of progressive celebrities saying terrible things and keeping their jobs.
ESPN is expanding Keith Olbermann’s role at the network despite a Twitter feed full of hysterical, profane insults and unhinged commentary. Fire one celebrity and you can dredge up six more who’ve posted their own deranged rants. At the same time, does the Right really want to turn Roseanne into a poster child of political persecution? We all know that progressives get more grace than conservatives, but where does Roseanne fit? We’re left with a mess. To argue that companies should err on the side of free speech — as I do all the time — is not to argue that companies can’t have any standards at all.
“I’m not troubled by Roseanne’s termination,” French concludes. “Sometimes, a story fits no one’s political narrative cleanly. Sometimes, the story
is the confusion and brokenness of our times.”
In
the Weekly Standard Jonathan Last writes in his post “Trumpism Corrupts: Roseanne Edition” that Roseanne wasn’t a conservative, and conservatives should have known better than to be seduced into vouching for her just because her fictional character at times resembled them. “[T]he seduction of
Roseanne is understandable,” Last writes. “It was a sitcom that got people to pay attention because it treated Red America Trump voters as normal (-ish) human beings. People on the right were desperate to see Republican types portrayed with any sort of sympathy by Hollywood. And so, they latched onto her, and her show, despite the fact that Roseanne Barr isn’t any sort of conservative. They should have known better, because Roseanne isn’t just ‘not any sort of conservative.’ She is, at best, a vulgarian and, at worst, a cretin.”
Last also links the intellectual and moral drift of Roseanne viewers to that of Trump voters:
You start out thinking, Hey, this is kind of sketchy. But then you see the overnight numbers and you forget all about crotch-grabbing and conspiracy theories. But that stuff never really goes away. So eventually, Roseanne is calling Valerie Jarrett a Muslim Dr. Zaius and then conservatives find themselves defending her brave free speech or whatever. (And by the by, the Valerie Jarrett comment was only the second-worst thing she said today.) In that way, Roseanne was a lot like Trumpism. You start out thinking, I know he’s said some weird stuff and has a shady past, but illegal immigration is a real problem! And the next thing you know, you’re defending a president who plays footsy with white supremacists and accuses a former president of—literal—treason.
Good for them!
