A Rose Without Thorns?

By James Poniewozik Sunday, July 27, 2003
    • The former star of the No. 1 sitcom Roseanne once claimed to have more than 20 personalities. And on her new reality show — about her attempt to get yet another show, a cable cooking series, on the air — we meet several. There's the imperious diva, legendary for throwing tantrums and firing employees. There's the woman on a "spiritual journey," who asks a cabalistic rabbi to analyze the faces of applicants for a producing job. There's the coddled Hollywood loony (see previous sentence). There's the insecure self-doubter, the self-described "genius" and the cake-baking hausfrau.

    The reality series (ABC, Wednesdays, 9 p.m. E.T., starting Aug. 6) is called The Real Roseanne Show, though it's probably pointless to ask the real Roseanne to please stand up amid this crowd. But at least we know what her name is. The woman who began as acerbic housewife-comedian Roseanne Barr became Roseanne Arnold during her stormy marriage to luckiest-man-in-show-biz Tom Arnold, then dropped her surname altogether is now Barr again — a concession to the fact that she's no longer famous enough for a uninym.


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    That is a surprisingly humble admission from Barr. So is this: after losing her sitcom, then losing a talk show after a two-year run — her agency even fired her — she realized that if she was ever going to work in TV again, she was going to have to shed her bad-boss rep and learn to be (gulp) nice. "I couldn't get a job because of it," she says. "Whether justified or unjustified, I knew I gotta fix it all to get a job."

    The job she eventually aimed for was host of a cooking show with celebrity guests; at age 50, she says, she's too "tired and old" to do another sitcom. But she also had the idea that what happens behind the scenes of any TV show is often juicier than what makes it on air. For the show-about-the-show, her agent paired her with veteran reality producer R.J. Cutler (American High). ABC Family channel ultimately bought the cooking show, Domestic Goddess, which starts in September.

    Real Roseanne introduces Barr's family and hangers-on, including son Jake and son-in-law Jeff, TV neophytes who will help produce her cable cooking show; Drew, one of the few writers she hasn't fired; and boyfriend Johnny, a children's songwriter she met over the Internet (he emailed her the lyrics to a song called Down at the Doughnut Farm, he says, and "it sorta took off from there"). During the show they all meet in an office decorated with her old TV Guide covers, and she gives them the assignment: figure out a way, any way, to get her back on TV. "What do I want?" she asks, after shooting down a string of ideas. "I just want to do that talk show again."

    If celebrities are our royalty, then there's a kind of Lioness in Winter drama to Real Roseanne. Big celebs — your Puffys, your Madonnas — inhabit a blissful zone in which their ids are perfectly in synch with pop culture's superego. Satisfying their whims (I'm going to make my new husband executive producer of my sitcom!) seems to be not self-indulgent but good business sense. When they slip out of that zone (I'm going to have my blue-collar sitcom character win the lottery!), the damage can be irreparable. That Barr's comeback plan involves slinging salsa on basic cable only adds poignancy. It is like watching the deposed dictator of a mighty power plotting with her die-hard retainers to return to glory by taking over Luxembourg.

    Letting Cutler show her this way was a risk, but it pays off. Reformed or not, she's still funny, and you cheer for her out of the sheer force of her will to fame. And Barr says the show finds her "trying to be nice. Then you see me screw up all the time. I'm showing I'm the best example of a really horrible person who has changed."

    Is that the real Roseanne? The real Roseanne, the show suggests, is not on camera: she is the mega-celebrity who once was and may or may not return but whose memory keeps her retinue in line, keeps her audience at attention and keeps Barr working, toward the day she might be just Roseanne again.