I'm trying to work up some sympathy and I ... can't.

ABC executives reportedly are now saying that they regret firing the star of their hit comedy, Roseanne, who made a bad tweet and got canned for it.

According to the Daily Caller:

Two top ABC executives regret firing actress Roseanne Barr from eponymous hit show “Roseanne,” The Daily Mail reported Thursday.

Barr was abruptly let go from ABC following an allegedly Ambien-fueled Twitter tirade in which she tried to draw a parallel between Valerie Jarrett, a former aide to President Barack Obama, and “Planet of the Apes.” She also claimed billionaire “George Soros is a nazi who turned in his fellow Jews 2 be murdered in German concentration camps & stole their wealth.”

Following her dismissal from ABC in May, the network announced they would continue the show with a spinoff that would exclude Barr called “The Conners.”

Her real problem, of course, was that she supported Trump. Seems they fired her to show their political correctness, even though the pro-Trump comedienne had apologized for her bad tweet.

Nope, had to get it politically correct, the better to enjoy polite society's opinion, which was an odd thing given that the Roseanne show is a show of interest only to the working class.

And it's not like they didn't know what they were getting when they hired her and opted to make money off her considerable talents. Such talk is kind of what she does.

Did Michelle Obama have something to do with this? One wonders, given that the accusation looked like more than it was dismissed as, and the Obamas are well known to have their fingers in the business of Hollywood these days, as their lucrative Netflix deal suggests. We all know they gummed up traffic regularly in Beverly Hills during their presidency, at least if we lived there at the time, and we know the Obama Hollywood pal list runs thick. If the claim is true, obviously allowing politicos to make business decisions about television shows is not the bonanza these network executives thought it might be.

Because firing Roseanne was an astoundingly dumb call, amounting to shutting off the TV set of the public for the sake of virtue-signalling to PBS-watching whites, and obviously it was noticible to the public, given that large numbers of them enjoyed that show. What a coincidence: Polls from a new book shows that more than 80% of the entire public (across racial lines) can't stand political correctness. I wouldn't be surprised if this show shutdown had something to do with it.

Now the ABC execs are crying in their beer, and not because they wish they weren't such suckers for the hucksters of political correctness but because it's hitting their bottom line. Fire your namesake star from a top show, don't be surprised if the audience doesn't come back. What kind of brains did that take? According to the Daily Caller:

“When we greenlit The Conners we thought that the public would tune in to see the family return but what we’ve discovered is that people want Roseanne — they don’t want the family by themselves,” a second ABC source said. “The marketing and publicity teams are horrified as no matter what promotional material is released – and let’s be honest it’s been limited for a show that launches next Tuesday – Roseanne’s fans come out in force stating that they won’t watch the show.”

What's more, we are seeing a gross effort from the left to spin the Roseanne-less show as not so bad (see here and here) but the serious Hollywood press is saying the firing of the star leaves the show a dud. Here's the brutal truth from Deadline Hollywood:

From the two episodes that I’ve seen, the adequate offering with solid core performances from Fishman, John Goodman, Laurie Metcalf, Sara Gilbert, and Lecy Goranson is packed with jokes and one-liners you can see coming long before they land and full of scenarios you’ve seen a million times before on the small screen.

Bleached of the Donald Trump associations and politics that made the March 27 Roseanne return debut crackle with confrontational relevance, the Gilbert, Tom Werner, Tony Hernandez, Bruce Helford, Bruce Rasmussen and Dave Caplan executive produced Conners distinctly doesn’t seem to want to cause any waves for itself or the network – and that’s the biggest problem.

So yeah, we can conclude that getting rid of Roseanne and leaving her lifeless show intact is going to hit ABC's bottom line. They had a winner in hand and sacrificed it to the gods of political correctness.

Image credit: Monterey Media, via Flickr // CC BY-SA 2.0 and CC BY-SA 3.0