{"id":179059,"date":"2018-05-29T18:03:00","date_gmt":"2018-05-29T23:03:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2018\/05\/29\/we-live-in-strange-times-2\/"},"modified":"2018-05-29T18:03:00","modified_gmt":"2018-05-29T23:03:00","slug":"we-live-in-strange-times-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2018\/05\/29\/we-live-in-strange-times-2\/","title":{"rendered":"We Live in Strange Times"},"content":{"rendered":"
We now live in a time when we have to praise the moral courage of television executives<\/a>:<\/div>\n

Two months ago, Roseanne Barr was a star again.<\/p>\n

Her sitcom \u201cRoseanne\u201d returned in March after a two-decade absence to enormous ratings on ABC. Network executives were celebrating their strategy of appealing to wider swaths <\/a>of the country after Donald J. Trump\u2019s surprising election win and the president himself called Ms. Barr to congratulate her<\/a> on the show\u2019s large audience.<\/p>\n

But on Tuesday, that all came crashing down. ABC abruptly canceled \u201cRoseanne\u201d hours after Ms. Barr, the show\u2019s star and co-creator, posted a racist tweet about<\/a> Valerie Jarrett, an African-American woman who was a senior adviser to Barack Obama throughout his presidency and considered one of his most influential aides. Ms. Barr wrote if the \u201cmuslim brotherhood & planet of the apes had a baby=vj.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ms. Barr later apologized, but it was too late. In announcing the show\u2019s cancellation, ABC\u2019s entertainment president, Channing Dungey, said in a statement that \u201cRoseanne\u2019s Twitter statement is abhorrent, repugnant and inconsistent with our values.\u201d<\/p>\n

The show had ended its successful comeback season last week and was expected to return in September for a 13-episode run. Robert A. Iger, the chief executive of the Walt Disney Company, ABC\u2019s corporate parent, shared Ms. Dungey\u2019s statement on his own Twitter account<\/a>, adding: \u201cThere was only one thing to do here, and that was the right thing.\u201d<\/p>\n

The sudden cancellation of a hit show \u2014 it had the highest ratings of a new TV series in years<\/a> \u2014 because of offscreen controversy was almost without precedent.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Seriously, I would not expect this from someone with the title, “President of ABC Entertainment Group.”<\/p>\n

Entertainment executives are not generally known for taking morally courageous stands.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We now live in a time when we have to praise the moral courage of television executives: Two months ago, Roseanne Barr was a star again. Her sitcom \u201cRoseanne\u201d returned in March after a two-decade absence to enormous ratings on ABC. Network executives were celebrating their strategy of appealing to wider swaths of the country …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[415,537,398,614],"class_list":["post-179059","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-entertainment","tag-integrity","tag-racism","tag-television"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/179059"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=179059"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/179059\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=179059"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=179059"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=179059"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}