Former child star Michael Fishman is shooting down the idea that Roseanne Barr’s sitcom reboot was unjustly canceled in 2018.
Fishman — who played DJ Conner in the original Nineties series — shared an Instagram video Monday defending ABC’s years-old decision to pull Barr’s show off the air after she posted a series of racist tweets.
The actor, 44, started out the reel by addressing a recent comment he received from an Instagram user, which said: “The reboot got canceled because Roseanne made the usual jokes a comedian makes but America decided to backstab Roseanne. At the time the LGBTQ and woke crap took over and started destroying anything it could. Roseanne was one of the people that all of a sudden got flack for remaining to be a edgy comedian. Funny thing is even if she was racist, she had already said more egregious jokes and nobody batted an eye before.”
With tears in his eyes and seemingly exhausted by the discourse, Fishman said to the camera: “I get this every day. I get these kinds of ignorant and inaccurate comments daily. Mostly, I try to ignore them. For over eight years, I’ve been dealing with it quietly. Usually, I don’t respond.”
However, he said, “After eight years, turning the other cheek really isn’t helping.”
“So, I guess the world failed to learn the lesson. So I’m going to point out. We are perpetuating a lie, and people are using a political smokescreen to justify the indefensible,” he said.
Barr called her own behavior “indefensible” in a 2018 apology after the controversial tweets, one of which compared former President Barack Obama’s advisor, Valerie Jarrett, to an “ape.” She later claimed that she had been on Ambien while writing the post, and that she did not know Jarrett was Black.
The comedian, now 73, was quickly fired from the Roseanne revival months after its premiere. The reboot was then brought back without Barr as The Conners, which aired its last episode in 2025.
“Dehumanizing people is never a joke,” Fishman said. He went on to add that while performers benefit from freedom of speech, “that doesn’t mean there’s no responsibility and no consequences.”
“The brilliant comedians help us laugh at the darkest, darkest topics,” he said. “Sadly, in this case, there was no joke. And the show was rightfully canceled. It’s the last time I’m really gonna go into this.”
He said about Barr: “Good people make mistakes. And I love the one who made this mistake. I always will. I’ll always have compassion and love, and I’ve shown it continuously and she helped the world understand that good people can make mistakes.”
“But there was no joke. There’s only damage. Dehumanizing and perpetuating racial tropes leads to real world consequences,” he says. “And the only people who are backstabbed were the people who were targeted by the statements. And those who became collateral damage from it.”
Fishman concluded by urging commenters who enable racism and hatred to “be smart enough to just shut the hell up.”
“Don’t finish the statement. Don’t hit send and certainly don’t rage against anybody else. Because words have real world consequences. And some of us deal with them every day. That’s freedom of speech.”
The Independent has reached out to Barr for comment.
