Just when you thought this Barr couldn’t go lower…
ABC pulled the plug on its hit ’90s revival “Roseanne” Tuesday hours after star and creator Roseanne Barr went on a racist Twitter rant that drew immediate coast-to-coast scorn and sharp rebukes from her co-stars and network.
“Roseanne’s Twitter statement is abhorrent, repugnant and inconsistent with our values and we have decided to cancel her show,” ABC Entertainment president Channing Dungey said in a statement.
The network swung the axe swiftly over Barr’s tweets — in which she compared former Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett to an ape and called billionaire George Soros a “Nazi” who “turned in his fellow Jews.”
“Muslim brotherhood & planet of the apes had a baby=vj,” Barr, who played brash matriarch Roseanne Conner on the show, wrote in one tweet aimed at Jarrett, which she later deleted.
Then, after falsely claiming that Chelsea Clinton is married to Soros’ nephew, Barr responded with an “apology” that included a conspiracy-mongering rant about the Democratic megadonor.
“Sorry to have tweeted incorrect info about you!I Please forgive me! By the way, George Soros is a nazi who turned in his fellow Jews 2 be murdered in German concentration camps & stole their wealth-were you aware of that? But, we all make mistakes, right Chelsea?” Barr wrote.
“Soros’ goal; the overthrow of us constitutional republic by buying/backing candidates 4 local district attorney races who will ignore US law & favor ‘feelings’ instead-and call everyone who is alarmed by that ‘racist’,” she added in a follow-up tweet.
In response, ABC and Hulu also yanked the reboot from their streaming platforms, Viacom pulled all reruns from its networks, and Barr’s talent agency ICM Partners dropped her as a client.
Robert Iger, chairman and CEO of Disney, which owns ABC, addressed the abrupt move on Twitter.
“There was only one thing to do here, and that was the right thing,” he said.
The cancellation is a costly move for ABC — the network had already booked $22.7 million in ads for season of the revival, according to NBC News.
The wildly popular first season — a continuation of the hit sitcom (1988-’97) about the working-class Conner family and starring most of the original cast, including John Goodman and Laurie Metcalf — debuted to a massive 18.2 million viewers in March and became one of the most expensive primetime comedies for advertisers.
Barr played a staunch supporter of President Trump in the show’s revival, and the commander in chief called the comedian to congratulate her on the premiere’s ratings.
When pitching to ad buyers just two weeks ago, ABC brought Barr up on stage to laud the show’s success — where Disney-ABC TV president Ben Sherwood quipped that Barr “really writes most of my tweets,” according to the Hollywood Reporter.
Dungey, the first black entertainment president of a major broadcast network, boasted that the reboot had been watched by “one in 10 Americans.”
But the network and its hit show were facing nearly universal backlash that snowballed Tuesday afternoon when comic Wanda Sykes announced she was quitting as consulting producer.
Sara Gilbert — who played Barr’s TV daughter Darlene Conner in both iterations of the show — then slammed the remarks as “abhorrent.”
“I am disappointed in her actions to say the least,” Gilbert tweeted just before the cancellation was announced.
Actress Emma Kenney, who played Barr’s on-screen granddaughter on the revival, said she’d tried to quit the show over the “racist and distasteful” tweets, but was told it had already been cancelled.
“I am hurt, embarrassed, and disappointed. The racist and distasteful comments from Roseanne are inexcusable,” the 18-year-old actress tweeted.
Jarrett responded by saying she’s “fine” but wants to turn the saga into a “teaching moment” about racism that others endure every day.
“I’m fine, I’m worried about all the people out there who don’t have a circle of friends and followers coming to their defense,” she told MSNBC Tuesday.
A spokesman for Soros called the tweets about him “an affront to Mr. Soros and his family” and “insulting to the victims of the Holocaust, to all Jewish people, and to anyone who honors the truth.”
Asked about the brouhaha, White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Trump was too busy with North Korea and trade deals.
“We have a lot bigger things going on in the country right now,” she said before he spoke at a rally in Nashville, Tenn.
Meanwhile, Obama’s former national security adviser and ex-UN Ambassador Susan Rice noted that Barr called her “a man with big swinging ape balls” way back in 2013 — retweeting a screengrab of the disgraced comedian’s original tweet.