Stealing the Show Read online

  In this virtually executive-free bubble, Barr “gave notes if she felt like it, or she and Tom just went off in their electric wheelchairs and zoomed around while we went back to the writers’ room and worked,” Sherman-Palladino recalls, referring to the couple’s penchant for using motorized wheelchairs to get around the set. She says it was a remarkably functional work environment while it lasted: “I don’t know what he was like as a husband, but the thing about Tom was he wanted that show to keep going.”

  * * *

  “They kept saying women ain’t funny. All through my career, some Bozo would say, ‘I gotta give it to you, most women aren’t funny, but you . . .’ ” At age sixty-three, Barr shakes her head as if she still can’t believe it. “It was that token thing. Then you’d hear them say the same thing to the next woman.” Although she made an effort to hire female writers for her series, Barr treated many of them much the way she did male scribes—which is to say, brutally. At one point, she decided to make the writers wear numbers around their necks rather than address them by name. Sherman-Palladino was number two. Stan Zimmerman and James Berg were twelve and thirteen, respectively.

  Eileen Heisler (who had left before numbers were assigned) described the Roseanne writers’ room as “a crowded car ride on a vacation. You were stuck in this small space for hours and hours and hours . . . but everyone could speak their mind and it was a messy, real, passionate discussion. And if Roseanne didn’t like the script, you had to rewrite the script.” Barr was also prone to irrational edicts. “She would meet Joan Collins at a party, and she would come in on Monday and say, ‘I want Joan Collins in the episode next week,’ ” says DeAnn Heline. “So it was that kind of thing. She’s not in the writers’ room, so you are just there late hoping that this is what she wants.”

  Barr insists she was just pushing to achieve the smartest show possible. “I was the big boss bitch. I’m not your mother. You’re getting paid ten grand a week, you owe somebody something.” She continues: “I worked with some writers that, no matter how hard you beat them down—and it was fun to try—no matter how much you beat them down, they kept coming up with better and better shit, because they would be like, ‘We might get fired if we don’t get off this couch and deliver laughs!’ ”

  Heisler, who along with Heline went on to work for Murphy Brown (and later to co-create the sharp working-class family sitcom The Middle), recalls that “table reads on Murphy were like great sex. The cast would look at you like, ‘Which one of you guys made this funny joke?’ They really appreciated it.” Whereas, on Roseanne, she says, “It was kind of an atmosphere of fear.”

  By the midpoint of the series, Barr was living the surreal existence of a superstar—dogged by tabloids, divorced from everyday reality. Says Heline, “She occasionally would want to wear some outfit on the show that Roseanne Conner would not have worn, and Tom would say, ‘Rosie, you can’t wear that. That is not for a woman from the Midwest. You’ve gotta go change.’ And she would listen to him. He got what the show was, and so, in that season at least, he was a force for good.”

  Not content with steering Barr’s ship, Arnold commandeered a show of his own: The Jackie Thomas Show featured him as an obnoxious sitcom star with a backstory much like Arnold’s. The reviews for the 1992 ABC series were mixed (Tom Shales of the Washington Post called Jackie Thomas “a character smaller than life”), and Barr responded by faxing some reviewers nasty letters. Ever the diplomat, she took a similarly aggressive approach with her own network. Outraged that ABC didn’t immediately renew Jackie Thomas (because it wasn’t getting the blockbuster ratings they’d expected in the time slot after Roseanne), she went on talk shows threatening to move her own series to another network. A pissed-off ABC proceeded to ax Jackie Thomas. However, not wanting to lose Barr, who, uncontrollable as she was, had the number-two show in America, ABC committed to developing new programs with the Arnolds’ production company.

  One of the ideas developed was a sitcom based around the all-female R&B quartet En Vogue. Sherman-Palladino remembers being asked to write the pilot and meet the group. “None of them could talk, and I thought, That’s it. It’s over!” she recalls. But the Arnolds liked the script, so the decision was made to cast proper actresses, including a young Salma Hayek.

  “The night we shot the pilot, Roseanne kicked Tom out and had Tom’s bags delivered to the stage while we were shooting. So, we’re sitting there, and Tom is in a state of shock, and guys with bags are coming in . . .” Sherman-Palladino shrugs. “That was the end of that.”

  Barr filed for divorce in April 1994, the climax of a string of wild spectacles dubbed “Roseanne & Tom’s Traveling Media Circus” by People. Those publicity maneuvers included the announcement of a three-way marriage among Roseanne, Tom, and his twenty-four-year-old assistant, Kim Silva, who was rumored to be the catalyst for the divorce. Barr then accused her husband of physical abuse, recanting the accusation later but ultimately following through with the divorce.

  The traits that made Barr such a supernova—her fuck-everyone-and-say-anything attitude, her compulsion to go too far and push too hard—were the same ones that would inevitably trip her up. Her power came from being an outsider, and eventually she would provoke the establishment into casting her out again.

  “It was when she and Tom broke up—that’s when things went completely haywire,” says Sherman-Palladino. “That’s when things started happening like the lottery.” In the show’s final season, Roseanne Conner wins $108 million in the state lottery, triggering a series of episodes that bear no resemblance to anything that had come before. Jackie dates a prince, and she and Roseanne fly to New York City, where they hobnob with the jet-set crowd. The sisters mingle with a magazine editor played by Marlo Thomas and a perfume magnate played by Arianna Huffington.

  Absolutely Fabulous characters Patsy and Edina (Joanna Lumley and Jennifer Saunders) also pop up out of nowhere in that episode. At the time, Barr was working with Saunders to adapt the politically incorrect portrait of two shameless, booze-soaked British fashionistas for American television; she recognized Patsy and Edina as fellow travelers in the sisterhood of unruly women. It soon became clear that American networks would require Ab Fab to strip away its most loutish elements, however. Roseanne could get away with being a loudmouthed woman because she was grounded by her ordinary family; two single older women doing drugs, sleeping with younger men, and genuinely thumbing their noses at motherhood couldn’t find a place on American network television in the nineties. The American Ab Fab project was dropped.

  Even in its last three seasons, Roseanne continued to cycle through executive producers and writers, including Eric Gilliland, Cynthia Mort, and Daniel Palladino. (The last would meet and marry Amy Sherman after both had left the series.) Janet Leahy, who wrote for Roseanne toward the end of its run, says some of the “ludicrous” story lines resulted from Barr eventually taking on too much control. “It is one thing to have editorial power and another to have creative power, and I think that crossed over in the end, and that was part of the problem.” She recalls that one of the writers had pitched an alternative twist to the lottery plot: “[The Conners] had a lottery ticket on their fridge and they had won the lottery, but they never knew it because they never checked the ticket. That, to me, is brilliant and real. And then the show wouldn’t have gone off in that weird direction,” she says with a laugh.

  Barr never discussed her rationale for the lottery plotline much, but she did tell Spin magazine that it was her way of returning the show to its roots (the saga of her real life) and to communicate “how dreams come true. You know, the American dream and how these incredible things happened to me, who used to be this housewife with all these kids.” She said she’d always planned to end season eight with Roseanne Conner doing stand-up comedy: “I was always showing these poor people, who were working really hard but never getting ahead. I realized I came here literally out of a trailer because I didn’t believe that. And I have to correct
that because I can’t leave these characters in a place where their hard work never pays off.” And yet, in the May 1997 series finale, the lottery is revealed to be a fantasy—a fictional tale written by Roseanne Conner to console herself in the wake of Dan’s death from a heart attack.

  After nearly a decade of cultural dominance and personal chaos, Barr left the prime-time airwaves. She was exhausted but immensely powerful—or so it seemed. A 1995 New Yorker profile referenced a deal for her company Full Moon and High Tide to produce four more series. Barr estimated she’d be worth a billion dollars by the end of the twentieth century. In the following years, though, she seemed unable to build on her show’s massive success. There was talk of doing a spin-off focused around son DJ that never materialized. A plan to do an ABC talk show special in which she’d interview Mike Tyson fell apart. Roseanne turned her back on her longtime network and proceeded to shoot the talk show for syndicator King World (Oprah’s distributor) instead. “I figured I would be making Oprah money, so I told ABC to F—off—another of my genius moves!” she wrote in her book Roseannearchy. Later, there would be several reality shows featuring her extended family and failed attempts at sitcoms (such as Downwardly Mobile, a 2012 comedy pilot that reunited Barr and John Goodman) before, in 2017, ABC announced a reboot of Roseanne.

  There was also a run for president as the 2012 Green Party candidate. “I do like making trouble on behalf of the public,” Barr says now, her brassy voice tempered a bit by age. But she gets impatient at ordinary folks’ penchant for self-deception. “Like George Carlin says, the owners of this country are in a club, and you ain’t in it. Don’t lie to yourself!” Asked if she thinks she extended Carlin’s legacy of populist comedy, she pauses. “I think I did my part when it was my time to do something. And I sure had fun doing it, too.” She lets loose a sudden hoot. “Christ, it was fun!”

  Of course, not all of it was fun. “I got caught in the middle of something, and it was so huge and so unstoppable it was like a speeding train,” she told a reporter at the end of Roseanne’s run. “I’ve seen it happen to other people when they start to get famous or they have great success. I think a lot of people just spin so far out of control that they die.”

  Sherman-Palladino feels great sympathy for her former boss. “We were the number one sitcom, and you got thirty million viewers every week. . . . But [Roseanne] was never a really happy woman. She had so much power, and I don’t know that she got to enjoy any of what she did. She was really a target, and she never got the respect in the town she should have.”

  Judd Apatow first met Barr as a twenty-two-year-old, when he was hired to write material for her stand-up act. He, too, remains in awe of her creative chutzpah. “A lot of people painted it as out-of-control behavior, but really, it was someone taking control of her world as best she could, being the person she was. She made landmark television for a really long time, and it was done in a unique, eccentric way,” Apatow says. He pauses, then adds, “Okay, at times it was probably really unhealthy. But what she left behind is so groundbreaking. We had Maude and Rhoda and Mary Tyler Moore, and then Roseanne took it to a whole other level.”

  * * *

  Roseanne Barr is now a Ghost of Television Past, so strange and contradictory that it’s hard to believe she was once one of America’s biggest TV stars. From her prime-time pedestal, she brought all kinds of progressive notions about gender and class to the homes of a nation convulsed by a culture war. She found a way to turn the insult of being poor and a woman inside out: Although Roseanne Conner sometimes pretended to be lazy and a lousy mom, she was neither. Always finding a way to keep the family afloat, she supported her kids through elopements, pregnancy, and disappointments, and she bolstered her husband through job loss, depression, and illness.

  Murphy Brown and Roseanne launched and ended around the same time, and many commentators saw the shows as two sides of the same coin. At a moment when a retrogressive notion of “family values” loomed over the culture, both shows provided a realistic and contemporary conception of what a family could be—fluid, imperfect—and in the process paved the way for future shows such as Modern Family, Fresh Off the Boat, and Transparent. While Murphy represented the upscale end of left-wing America, Roseanne shouted out to the neglected underbelly of the eighties—the poor, the overweight, the silent and frustrated white working class.

  Together, they were a feminist superhero team. Yet Diane English and Roseanne Barr say they never met in all that time. English admired her competitor greatly, but Barr felt alienated by the kind of middle-class liberal feminism Murphy Brown represented.

  Eileen Heisler, who wrote for both shows, felt strongly back then just how different Murphy and Roseanne were from the standard TV heroines. “They were sarcastic, flawed, messy, naughty, not always nice. Murphy—that was one of the most fun characters to write ever because she knew what she wanted and she’d step all over people to get it and then be surprised it wasn’t what she wanted.” But it was Roseanne that ultimately played a part in inspiring The Middle, the sitcom Heisler and Heline created two decades later about a working-class Indiana family struggling to pay bills and do right by their scrappy, eccentric kids. “The Middle’s roots are Roseanne for sure,” she says. “We loved the marriage of Dan and Roseanne and the dignity of people trying hard.”

  There was no doubt that Barr was Roseanne’s heart and its conscience, goading everyone around her to be faithful to that vision. “She knew the truth and she could smell it when something wasn’t true or real,” notes Janet Leahy. “There were so many writers, but there was an absolute voice that ran through that show: hers.”

  CHAPTER 3

  * * *

  Walking and Talking as Fast as They Can:

  Amy Sherman-Palladino’s Gilmore Girls

  Amy Sherman-Palladino and Lauren Graham celebrate Gilmore Girls’s one-hundredth episode, December 2004.

  Strolling across the Warner Bros. backlot on a sunny spring day, I search for the landmarks of Stars Hollow. That’s the small-town idyll at the heart of Gilmore Girls, where oddballs roam free, members of Sonic Youth and Yo La Tengo compete to be town troubadour, and civic pride wafts through every shabby-chic street.

  First, I spot Miss Patty’s dance studio, where Stars Hollow’s town meetings take place. I peek through the window hoping to see tiny ballerinas doing pliés inside, but the barn is empty. Around the sun-soaked square are the familiar outlines of the town’s main drag, including Luke’s Diner, site of the slow-simmering flirtation between gruff owner Luke Danes and single mom Lorelai Gilmore. But the retro signage has been stripped off, and other hints of change are all around: there’s a trendy boutique called Diva Dish and even a cupcake store. It’s not the spoils of gentrification to blame, though; it’s the relentless pace of a working TV backlot, where they’ve already begun clearing the sets of the Gilmore Girls reboot to make way for a new season of Pretty Little Liars.

  A few blocks over, though, the Gilmore Girls crew has taken up residence on a generically urban street. Netflix has briefly revived the series as Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life, nine years after its original incarnation ended. Extras in gowns and tuxes mill aimlessly up and down the street, waiting to be called. I am directed through the front door of a building, where I find myself plunged into a disconcerting scene: a smoky tango club surrounded by decadently dressed dancers. Everyone seems to be frozen in impossibly angular poses. Realizing I have walked into a rehearsal, I dart through the tightly packed bodies.

  Midway through the room, I nearly crash into a small woman dressed in a black tunic and purple fedora. It’s Gilmore Girls’s creator Amy Sherman-Palladino, who is conducting the dancers with a beatific smile on her face. I keep moving, and tumble through the looking glass to the other side—the dark, cluttered backstage area known as Video Village, where the directors, writers, wardrobe people, and everyone else not needed on set are crammed into or behind director’s chairs.

  Sherman-Palladino plops down
in her seat next to her husband and writing partner, Daniel Palladino, boyish-looking in a tan blazer worn over a hoodie. The two stare at a monitor, which shows a Baz Luhrmannesque fantasia unfolding in the next room. Thirty-four-year-old actress Alexis Bledel, who was just nineteen when she first played Lorelai’s daughter, Rory, glides through the club’s beaded curtain with ex-boyfriend Logan (Matt Czuchry), who’s clad in a steampunk top hat and suit. Ten seconds into the take, Sherman-Palladino yells, “Cut!” and rushes out to confer and lay hands on dancers. Shooting proceeds in this staccato way. Bledel heads back to Video Village between takes to sit silently in the corner, pale and luminous as she swigs water and looks at her phone. They finally get through a full scene smoothly, but when Logan dips Rory romantically, her arm hangs down limply. “It kind of looks like a flopping fish,” Sherman-Palladino says, wrinkling her nose. She eventually directs the couple to end in a tight romantic clinch instead of a dip, forever banishing Rory’s fish arm to the cutting-room floor.

  “Can you spot the eighty-three-year-old dancer?” Sherman-Palladino calls out gleefully at one point. An elderly lady with close-cropped red hair wearing a short satin dress glides past the camera. It turns out that this is her mother, Maybin Hewes, a former dancer. Sherman-Palladino points out that she has partnered her mom with a Dancing with the Stars pro. “He’s treating her like a goddess. It feeds into all my childhood anxieties that everyone loves her and no one understands me!” she quips in her gravelly voice, shrugging mournfully like a borscht-belt comedian.