TV's 'Roseanne' Character to Die from Opioids?

Although the revival of ABC's sitcom "Roseanne" scored top ratings, the network killed the show after star Roseanne Barr sent out a tweet that many took to be racist.

Now, according to Barr, the network is set to do the same to her TV character when a new spinoff featuring other members of the "Roseanne" cast, "The Connors," launches.

Speaking on a right-wing YouTube program called "The Unsilent Minority," Barr – who has garnered plaudits from Trump supporters for her enthusiastic embrace of the current president, and whose TV character was likewise a Trumpista – spilled what she knows, or claims to know, about her character's fate.

"Oh, they killed her," Barr reportedly told host Brandon Straka, according to an article at Business Insider. "They have her die of an opioid overdose."

If true, that plot point could be taken as an homage to "Roseanne"'s longstanding tradition of representing the working class. In recent years, working class America has been ravaged by an epidemic of opioid use as small towns across the country have seen factories and other anchors for local economies close down and hard times have descended.

Barr's claims follow musings by former "Roseanne" co-star John Goodman that his character would be a widower in the new series, which is slated for a 10-episiode first season set to begin next month.

The tweet that cost Barr her hit show was sent out last May. In it, Barr made remarks about a former Obama advisor Valerie Jarrett that appeared to many as being racist, since it referred to Jarret as being the "baby" of the "muslim brotherhood & planet of the apes". Barr later claimed that she thought Jarret, who is African American, was "white," and denied that her tweet was racist.

The 1968 film "Planet of the Apes" depicts a future Earth in which humans have regressed to a primitive condition and are unable to speak, while gorillas, chimpanzees, and orangutans have evolved and established a new society.

African American comedian Wanda Sykes, who was a consulting producer for "Roseanne," announced she would be leaving the show shortly after news of the tweet broke. Barr claimed that she had tweeted the remark while under the influence of a sleep aid, but ABC was swift in deleting her sitcom from the network schedule.

But even if it turns out to be true, Barr's story about Roseanne's fate does not have to mean the end. After all, Goodman's character, Dan, supposedly succumbed to a heart attack at the end of the show's eighth season, a revelation made when the show went off the air at the end of its ninth year in a finale that posited that the entire final season had been a fantasy following his death - and yet, in "The Connors," it's Dan who's reportedly alive and well.