Thursday, March 28, 2024

‘Blackish’ Creator Kenya Barris Was Prepared to Protest ABC After Roseanne’s Racist Tweets

Black-ish” creator Kenya Barris and ABC have a contentious relationship.

The network won’t air an episode tackling the NFL anthem protests, and Netflix is attempting to recruit Barris.

Speaking at a panel on Wednesday, Barris explained why he was ready to part ways with ABC and questioned the decision to reboot comedian Roseanne Barr’s show in the first place, given her history of racist, transphobic and Islamophobic tweets.

“You hired a monster and then you asked why the monster was killing villagers,” he said at a panel on diversity in television writing, hosted by Variety.

“I was literally coming out of the show and I was like f— this. I was going to go crazy. I was going to call my agent and go on (CNN’s) Don Lemon and other shows,” Barris said. But first he called ABC Entertainment president Channing Dungey, Disney/ABC Television Group chief Ben Sherwood, and ABC Studios president Patrick Moran to warn them. “I was like, ‘I’m sorry guys’ and then I have to say, the response came in minutes.”

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Barris planned to protest Barr’s tweet, but before he got the chance to quit and kick off his PR campaign slamming ABC, Dungey told him to wait, as the network prepared to announce the cancellation of the “Roseanne” reboot.

“It was amazing. Having Channing at the head and having Bob (Iger) be supportive,” Barris said of the decision.

At the end of May, Barr fired off a tweet calling Valerie Jarrett, longtime adviser to former President Barack Obama, the result of when “muslim brotherhood & planet of the apes had a baby.”

ABC decided to pull the show later that same day, calling Barr’s statement “abhorrent, repugnant and inconsistent with our values.” Since this announcement, the network has also pulled all Roseanne reruns from local affiliates.

Barris previously said that he and ABC “mutually agreed” to shelve the “Black-ish” episode that planned to address NFL players protesting police brutality by kneeling during the national anthem

“Given our creative differences, neither ABC nor I were happy with the direction of the episode and mutually agreed not to air it,” Dungey said in a statement in March. He later said that “the kneeling part of it” was not central to the decision.

“There were a number of different elements to the episode that we had a hard time coming to terms on. Much has been made of the kneeling part of it, which was not even really the issue,” she told reporters in May. “But I don’t want to get into that too much. At the end of the day, it was a mutual decision between Kenya and the network to not put the episode out and I think we all feel that was the best decision overall.”

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