When ABC brought her sitcom back without her in 2018, the network killed off her character with an opioid overdose and kept the rest of the family on the air as The Conners.
About 10 months later, Roseanne Barr stood on a stage in Las Vegas and read the network a letter.
“At the first sign of controversy, you killed me off with a drug overdose,” she read at the Laugh Factory.
Now she has built a TV family of her own. Barr has finished filming Meemaw, an eight-episode comedy series shot in Austin, Texas, where she plays the matriarch of a mixed-race family of preppers, with Randy Quaid as her husband.
This time, she co-wrote the family herself.
The Roseanne Revival Was the No. 1 Scripted Show Among Viewers 18-49 Before ABC Canceled It
The revival had been a hit by any measure. Its premiere drew more than 27 million viewers, ABC renewed it three days later, and it finished its season as the No. 1 scripted primetime show among viewers aged 18 to 49, with about 20 million people watching each week.
Then, in May 2018, Barr posted a tweet calling former Obama aide Valerie Jarrett the offspring of the ‘Muslim Brotherhood & Planet of the Apes.’ Within hours, ABC canceled the show. Barr apologized and called the tweet “a bad joke,” and her agency, ICM, dropped her. The network retooled the series as The Conners, and the character who gave the show its name was written out with an overdose.
Barr has said since that she has done what she could to make amends. She told Sean Hannity on Fox News that she feels she has apologized, explained, asked for forgiveness and made recompense, and she called that part of her religion.
When she went back to standup at the Laugh Factory, Andrew Dice Clay introduced her as “a little special treat for everybody.”
Roseanne Barr Co-Wrote Meemaw and Filmed It Without a Network
Barr wrote Meemaw with Allen Covert, a longtime collaborator of Adam Sandler and his Happy Madison company. She began shooting quietly in Austin in November 2025, and private investors paid for it as a fully union production. She told Variety she had a plan if the studios passed.
“If Hollywood doesn’t buy it, then I’m just gonna make it myself,” she said.
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She did exactly that, and the family she built fills the house. Drea de Matteo plays her daughter, Omar Gooding plays her son-in-law, and social media star Indy Bugg plays her granddaughter, whose bat mitzvah drives the story. Doug Jones is in the cast too, along with Jon Lovitz, Kim Congdon, Patty Ross and Tony Hinchcliffe, who plays Satan.
Fans who watch Quaid as Cousin Eddie in National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation every December will recognize her new husband right away.
Subtitled A Modern Day Fable, the show is semi-autobiographical. The first promo image, shared by Page Six, describes a fiercely patriotic prepper grandma who sets out to save America, take down a criminal empire and throw her granddaughter the perfect bat mitzvah. Barr added that she thought now would be a great time for people to actually hear from a Jew.
She has said she wrote in jokes for her daughters, whom she calls super woke, the same way she did on Roseanne, and that she has some great jokes about Republicans that the left is going to love. She makes fun of everybody in power, she explained, and she summed it up for Page Six in five words.
“I’m an equal opportunity destroyer.”
She also mentioned that the show is every bit as revolutionary as her old one, if not more, and that her work has improved with time. De Matteo at her London Fashion Week debut, said she “just did a TV show … with everyone’s favorite mom.”
For now, Meemaw has no network, no streaming home and no release date. A union crew in Austin spent those months making eight episodes with nobody waiting at the end of them, on the strength of the investors’ money and one comedian’s word.
ABC once took her out of the family she played on television and kept the house running without her. In Meemaw, she wrote a new family around herself, took the grandmother’s chair and filmed it in Texas, and the question left is who will put it on the air.
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