Scott Marinoff wrote…
I'm in complete agreement with your post about the justification for the speedy cancellation of Roseanne, but I would like you to clarify one little detail for me.
It's the part where you posted: "I'm guessing there were execs at ABC who for whatever reason already wanted to dump the show and the tweet put the vote to do that over the top." For the life of me, I can't figure out what you're basing that guess on.
The speed with which the decision was made as well as the star's reputation for…I'll be polite and say "instability." Deciding to ax one of your most popular shows is not an action taken on impulse. It's the kind of thing you run past a lot of people including lawyers to determine any unforeseen legal complications. It would usually take a day or three…unless some execs there had already asked the musical question "What do we do if Roseanne returns to her old antics?"
Like I said, it's a guess. But a lot of people anticipated this kind of thing might happen. I linked to Stu Shostak but Ken Levine also saw it coming and, I'm sure, many folks at the network. (Ken, by the way, has a terrific guest on his podcast this week. It drops this evening over on his website.)
I should also have mentioned I see both sides of an argument here: I don't like the idea of someone being fired because of a joke, even a bad joke, even a joke in terrible taste. I assume we'll hear Bill Maher make a strong defense of Roseanne on his show this Friday night. But it's not endangering your Freedom of Speech if I exercise mine to not want to be associated with you. And there's nothing wrong with a network deciding they don't want to support the fame and fortune of someone who says something like that and is likely to do even worse before long.
If the remark had been tweeted by someone without her history, maybe we could see it as an outlier or even buy her excuse that it was the Ambien talking. Some stars possibly could have apologized more effectively and kept their shows. But this is Roseanne with a long history of acting like Roseanne. If you point your ear towards the ABC building and listen hard, I bet you can hear an awful lot of "I told you so"s.