Seeing the show as merely a platform for cheering on the right, however, overlooks the breadth of viewpoints represented. The reboot bowed to staggering ratings because Roseanne, both the actor and the character, acknowledges them.
A reality TV star works in the White House, and a big swath of working class, disgruntled white people put them there. But while Hollywood may be famously liberal, Barr is hardly the only household name to support Donald Trump - she's just one of scant few who's transparent about it, the radioactivity of the association be damned. There's almost no group of people Trump hasn't outraged since his rise, from women (after bragging about sexual assault) to Mexicans, immigrants and, well, everybody disgusted at his tacit approval of actual Nazis marching in Charlottesville. "You just love each other and focus on that."Ĭonsidering that Trump called Barr to offer congratulations at the show's ratings, producers' insistence that the show is not a platform for Roseanne's politics is a bitter pill to swallow. You're never going to get any family to agree with everything," said the star, who, it's worth nothing, is gay and married herself.
"I don't want people to focus on that ," series star and executive producer Sara Gilbert told TV Guide. Roseanne 2.0 isn't here to talk about the election, or the GOP but rather the ways Americans talk to each other in a time of frightening tribalism.Ī Crazy Number of People Watched the Roseanne Premiere Making Roseanne Conner a Trump supporter gives the reboot good real-world tension to play with, but still, her politics aren't the point. All that may make Roseanne Conner's new political leaning seem like an anomaly, even if the character is precisely the kind of blue-collar, white woman in a Midwestern town hit hard by new economic realities that voted for Trump. But Barr's primary function as an artist has always been to shake up the status quo: after all, portraying an overweight, exhausted working-class white woman in a culture that wanted her out of sight and mind was a wild departure for TV in 1989. The show has always been progressive without being political because Roseanne Barr pushed forward conversations about gay rights, abortion, workplace sexual harassment and racism in her show's original eight seasons, codifying her as a liberal felt accurate. Despite the ways Roseanne 2.0 has been politicized - from Donald Trump's giddy congratulations to the chorus of people insisting they won't watch - for the architects of Roseanne, the show is not about Roseanne Conner being a Trump supporter.