Roseanne Barr wants the world to believe her comeback is bigger than the scandal that sank her.
The 73-year-old comedian just wrapped a brand-new sitcom she’s billing as some of the best work of her career. But someone who helped build her legacy wants no part of it.
Barr says a family member personally reached out to her former co-star and asked him to make a quick appearance on the new series.
The answer came back short and simple, and it landed eight years after her infamous 2018 racist tweet ended her run on network television.
The rejection stings even more because this same actor once went on record defending her when Hollywood turned its back.
Barr has a new project called “Meemaw: A Modern Day Fable.” It’s an eight-episode, single-camera comedy she filmed in Austin, Texas, and paid for through private investors after the major networks passed.
The actress told Page Six, which first reported the project on Oct. 8, that it’s “every bit as revolutionary as ‘The Roseanne Show,’ if not more.”
Barr plays a fiercely patriotic survivalist grandmother who heads a mixed-race family. She also sets out to throw her granddaughter the bat mitzvah of a lifetime.
Randy Quaid plays her husband, Drea de Matteo plays her daughter, and Omar Gooding plays her son-in-law.
However, the show still has no network, streamer, or premiere date.
During a sit-down with The Hollywood Reporter published Tuesday, Oct. 20, Barr said she no longer gets along with her former co-stars who stood beside her for nine seasons and a revival.
“I don’t,” she said.
Barr meant co-star John Goodman. He played her husband, Dan Conner, from 1988 until ABC pulled the plug in 2018. “My son called Goodman and asked him to do a cameo on ‘Meemaw’ and he declined,” Barr revealed.
When asked if she keeps in touch with him or Laurie Metcalf, who played Jackie, she replied, “Of course not.”
“Nobody is more brokenhearted than me,” Barr added. “I just choose to remember the fun and the good times.”
Those good times came to a halt in May 2018.
The “Roseanne” revival was a ratings monster for ABC when Barr posted “Muslim brotherhood & planet of the apes had a baby=vj.”
“Vj” refers to Valerie Jarrett, a Black woman who served as a senior adviser to President Barack Obama.
ABC canceled the show within hours. The network then retooled it as “The Conners” and killed off Barr’s character with an opioid overdose. Goodman, Metcalf and Sara Gilbert stayed on for seven seasons, with the series wrapping in 2025.
At the time, Goodman stuck his neck out for her, insisting in a 2018 interview, “I know for a fact that she’s not a racist.”
By July 2025, the warmth was gone. “We haven’t talked for about seven or eight years,” he told The Hollywood Reporter, adding, “I’d rather doubt if she wants to talk to me.”
He has not publicly responded to Barr’s latest remarks.
Fans flooded an X post about the cameo snub, and most of them sided with Goodman. “Rosanne is literal career poison he made a smart choice,” one person wrote.
Another, who said he was a Black man who absolutely loved “Roseanne” in the ’90s, admitted, “I gotta say good for him.”
A third pointed out that after “eight years of silence and complete estrangement,” Barr apparently thought one phone call would be enough to land Goodman as a guest star.
Others tried to figure out why Goodman kept his distance in the first place. “He’s booked and busy in movies and other shows and probably doesn’t have time for her little show,” one user reasoned.
Another suggested the hard feelings started on Barr’s end, asking, “Roseanne you really didn’t want him? not after he stayed with that show after you left?!!!”
Goodman isn’t the only member of the Conner clan on Barr’s bad side. Just last month, she unloaded on Michael Fishman, who played her son D.J., after he said “Roseanne” was “rightfully canceled.” Barr fired back by calling him a “bigot,” an “ignoramus” and a “little f—ing worm,” according to TMZ.
None of this is new for Barr. In early 2025, she first teased a MAGA-themed comedy series centered on a small-town farmer fighting drug gangs and China, warning, “If Hollywood doesn’t buy it, then I’m just gonna make it myself.” Months later, she insisted she had no regrets about the Jarrett post, claiming “God told me to do what I did.”
Even her casting raised eyebrows. When word got out that Gooding had signed on, fans warned him about teaming up with her.
Whether “Meemaw” ever finds a home remains to be seen, but Dan Conner won’t be pulling up a chair.
