Roseanne Barr called michael fishman a “brainwashed bigot” after he said the 2018 Roseanne reboot was “rightfully canceled.” The attack came during a recent appearance on the Can’t Be Censored podcast, reopening a feud that never really cooled after ABC ended the series in May 2018.
March 2018 and May 2018
The reboot premiered in March 2018, then ABC canceled it in May 2018 after Barr tweeted a racist remark about Valerie Jarrett. Barr apologized multiple times, but ABC fired her and shut down the show anyway, turning a ratings win into one of television’s fastest reversals that year.
A month later, ABC announced The Connors with a majority of the Roseanne cast but without any involvement from Barr. That sequence matters here because Fishman’s comment about the reboot being “rightfully canceled” lands in a history where the replacement show moved forward without the original star.
Fishman and Barr
Barr said Fishman asked her about her comments “9,000” times before she told him to “go and f--- yourself and stay f---ed ‘till the day you die.” She also said, “Don’t put my name in your f---ng mouth; shut the f--- up.”
She went further, saying, “You are an ignoramus and a bigot, and you have no idea what I said because it contradicts the Democratic Party platform that you’ve had shoved down your throat and up your a--. So just f--- you. You have no geopolitical context whatsoever to discuss what I said.” The language is harsher than her public line in June 2025, when she said she had moved on and held no bitterness toward former co-stars.
June 2025 and The New Yorker
In June 2025, Barr told News Digital, “No, I’m not friends with none of them. They’re all in the past.” She added, “I have pleasant memories of what fun we had – wish them all the best. And no, we don’t talk.”
Laurie Metcalf told The New Yorker in a recent interview that she and Barr “haven’t spoken since we said goodbye at the end of the reboot.” That leaves the latest Barr-Fishman clash looking less like a one-off insult than another public marker of a split that began when ABC cut the show in 2018 and kept the franchise moving without Barr.
Roseanne Barr is 73, and her latest remarks show she still talks about the cancellation in two voices at once: she says she has moved on, then fires back with language that keeps the old wound open. What Fishman said in full during the interview is the remaining detail that would tell readers how far his comments pushed her over the edge.
