Archive through August 13, 2003
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TV ClubHouse: Archive: The Real Roseanne Show: Archive through August 13, 2003

Jan

Wednesday, August 06, 2003 - 06:14 pm EditMoveDeleteIP
anyone watch this tonight on ABC.I know it was on against BB but I watched it anyway. I quite liked it for some weird reason.

It is the documentary of Roseanne Barr trying to sell a new cooking show to a cable station while employing her totally useless son and son-in-law as producers and her new boyfriend as her god knows what. Her first ex husband ( the father of her older kids)is her handyman and his new wife is her assistant.

they are marketing the cooking show as white trash martha stewart

Seamonkey

Wednesday, August 06, 2003 - 09:30 pm EditMoveDeleteIP
I passed on it. But will scurry over to ABC for The Family in the next quarter hour or so.

Hippyt

Wednesday, August 06, 2003 - 09:51 pm EditMoveDeleteIP
yuck

Scorpiomoon

Thursday, August 07, 2003 - 01:38 am EditMoveDeleteIP
I watched a bit of this show during BB commercials.

Now that I think about it, I found the show quite life-affirming. Think about it: if someone like Roseanne--someone who is both unattractive interally and externally--can create the success she has, there is hope for all of us.

I found myself completely amazed and perplexed as to how this woman achieved any sort of success. She's a miserable, draining human being. She doesn't seem to have a clue as to what she's doing or how to surround herself with the right people.

Also, she really hasn't had any real "success" in years. Yet people still treat her like she's a massive star and some sort of creative genius. It can't just be because she has money. It's LA for Godsake. She's not the only one.

I will give her props for some of her funny one liners. When her Rabbi told her she always "jumps to conclusions" she responded, "That's the only exercise I get." LOL! That was funny.

Laura11103

Thursday, August 07, 2003 - 09:20 am EditMoveDeleteIP
I taped it, will watch it tonight...

Kellirippa

Thursday, August 07, 2003 - 09:27 am EditMoveDeleteIP
I watched most of the Roseanne show, and flipped back and forth with BB. I thought she was pretty good...very Roseanne-ie. She seems to be exactly what I expected her to be.

Certainly hope she doesn't make Johnny husband number 4 (4 right?). He looks like some old biker dude she picked up in a country and western bar.

Unless BB turns some corner and becomes more interesting, I think I'll be watching this show instead.

Jan

Thursday, August 07, 2003 - 11:16 am EditMoveDeleteIP
Kelli...my feelings exactly except that I have already done it! I told myself I would watch BB later on the west coast feed so I watched Roseanne instead..but then I read the BB posting of the show and figured I didn't miss much by not watching it at all. So now I will watch Roseanne and only watch BB if there is a shocker reported in the spoiler thread.

I feel the same way about the new beau..although at least he is a little more realistic about life than she is (he is a children's song writer that she met in chat on her site on the internet!!!)Those kids of hers are not coming across as too bright , n'est-ce pas!

Fruitbat

Thursday, August 07, 2003 - 01:13 pm EditMoveDeleteIP
I really liked her new beau! Smart, perceptive and handsome. :)

Squaredsc

Thursday, August 07, 2003 - 01:23 pm EditMoveDeleteIP
but is he hot?

Curlyq

Thursday, August 07, 2003 - 01:26 pm EditMoveDeleteIP
I taped this show and unfortunately the tape ran out halfway through, so I have no idea how it ended. I didn't think I'd like it, but just out of morbid curiosity I decided to tape it and see how obnoxious she would get. I kind of expected something lame and impossible to watch like Anna Nicole.

It wasn't as bad as I expected. Goodness knows this is not a woman I'd want to work for, or even spend more than five minutes with, but I do respect her accomplishments. Yes, they kiss up to her because she's rich, but she certainly wasn't always rich. She still thinks of herself as white trash.

Her ability to appeal to the everyday blue-collar crowd is what made her a success. When her sitcom debuted, it was the first time I'd ever seen a show where the house looked like the average messy, semi-chaotic home so many of us could identify with. The father was rumpled and the kids wore Kmart-quality clothes. The wise-cracking mom was a hard worker who looked less like an aging model and more like the real woman who lives next door. The last season of the show was ridiculous, but for many years it was a great success and I give credit for that to this tragically unhappy woman.

That being said, I'm not sure her idea for a cooking show would work, sense she's not really famous for her cooking skills. It was a little embarrassing seeing her internet friend hanging around like that. Her kids obviously have no idea what they're doing. It's too bad she doesn't seem to trust outsiders who could do a professional job for her. This is kind of like not only watching the train wreck, but also all of the events that lead up to it.

Kellirippa

Thursday, August 07, 2003 - 01:54 pm EditMoveDeleteIP
Well yeah, at least Johnny was the lone voice of reason when it came to hiring people based on the shape of their noses, LOL

Jan

Thursday, August 07, 2003 - 02:56 pm EditMoveDeleteIP
What does everyone think of the fact that her first husband is her handyman and her assistant is his new wife!!! I wonder if the third husband is still her chauffeur!

Tagurit

Thursday, August 07, 2003 - 04:32 pm EditMoveDeleteIP
I did as many of you did and flipped back and forth. Caught myself being more interested in this at times than BB. I did miss some stuff. Jan, you're a peach! I thought it was her 1st dh as the handyman but wasn't 100% sure. I drove myself nuts last night! lol I did enjoy how they kept showing him trying to contact his wife on the walkie talkie. lol

I think it is going to interesting and funny to watch her son and SIL being the producers. They have no clue what they are doing at all. lol I did feel a bit bad for her son (what is his name?) when he asked, "if I call you tonight will you take my call." He could of been joking but I couldn't imagine having to ask my mother that.

I'm not to sure about her bf/internet friend. He just seems a bit out of place there. (He kept reminding me of Sam Elliot. Maybe it was just the long, gray hair.) I don't see how is opinion would matter on an excutive producer though. Should be interesting if Ted doesn't work out and Roseanne gets annoyed because she listened to him and not the others.

Sanfranjoshfan

Thursday, August 07, 2003 - 06:11 pm EditMoveDeleteIP
I really enjoyed this show. I've always like Roseanne and her shennanigans have never really bothered me all that much. I know other people like her....they have good hearts and care about people but they also have problems coping. Throw celebrity and lots of money in the mix and you get all those problems in the media.

Yes, Roseanne does have some issues and she does often appear miserable....yet she is still awfully quick to crack a joke or crack a smile or just crack up with laughter, too! I've known plenty of miserable people that only have the misery side of the coin. I think Ms Barr has both.

The show was interesting and fun. I see it just as they described it....a real life Beverly Hillbillys! Let some regular folks do the Hollywood production thing.....lord knows most of the other stuff we see is so "formula"...it's time to see something original!

I hope the show's a hit...I mean, let's face it, a "white trash Martha Stewart" is just what this country needs!:)

Tishala

Saturday, August 09, 2003 - 09:43 am EditMoveDeleteIP
Overcooked Ham:'Real Roseanne' Is a Recipe for Disaster
By Tom Shales
Washington Post

"Enough already" was arguably reached ages ago in the case of Roseanne, but the infamously temperamental performer, who now wishes to be known again by her first-married name of Roseanne Barr (after Roseanne Arnold and then just Roseanne), feels an urge to return to television. She's doing it in a presumptuously double-barreled way: She'll star in a new cooking and interview show on the ABC Family cable network (as "the white-trash Martha Stewart") but will also appear in "The Real Roseanne Show," a reality series about the production of the cable opus.

And that is the series premiering tonight on ABC, with two back-to-back episodes at 9 on Channel 7. The new Roseanne has apparently been through countless hours of plastic surgery, the result being that her once-misleadingly cherubic visage has been sliced and diced into a face worthy of the cover girl on a Lane Bryant catalogue. But beneath all the chiseled flesh lurks the same old overweening, self-obsessed shrew.

"I'm an exhibitionist. . . . I have a huge ego. I need attention," Barr says, belaboring the painfully obvious. "I have to go on TV," she tells associates, because "there's no other way to make people laugh. It's like a compulsion." It's also like a vendetta, at least at this point, now that whatever is left of her old loyal audience has been battered and pummeled by Barr's increasingly pathetic public antics and all those scary tales of pitched fits, fired writers and sundry attacks of the screaming Me-Me's.

Barr squawks, screams and swears. She carps, she crabs, she curses. It all has a faintly nauseating familiarity. The frequent bleeping of words and phrases on the soundtrack reinforces the notion that this piece of infotainment came about because someone at ABC thought it could be that network's version of "The Osbournes." Haven't they heard at ABC that "The Osbournes" is yesterday's dumb old fad and that its once-mighty ratings have gone the way of all flushes?

Barr's comeback does have an encouraging promise attached: "I have one more in me, and that's it. If it don't go, I'm done." Scenes filmed inside her shiny, sprawling mansion suggest no one need weep for Barr if the cooking show flops, and to judge from the way we see it being put together, it has "Gigli" written all over it. The production process is slapdash and even amateurish-looking, as if Barr hadn't learned a thing from years of starring in, and essentially running, her own hit sitcom on ABC.

In the second of tonight's two episodes, she and her ragtag collection of accomplices audition and interview prospective executive producers. The first step is to look at videotape of each candidate being interviewed so that a "Kabbalic, face-reading rabbi" can make character assessments based on curvature of cheekbones and thinness of lips. After wasting a good deal of time on that, Barr tears up the rabbi's reports and throws them in the trash.

"No matter what I do, I pick the wrong people," she laments to those around her -- all of whom she previously, in some way, picked. "I don't know how to pick people," she says again. "I don't pick anyone right," she'd moaned earlier. "I am not good at making a decision," she declares. And from what we see on the screen, she's right. She shouldn't be in charge of anything more complicated than getting out of bed in the morning, and her little band of co-conspirators -- which includes a composer of children's songs she met via her Web site, her grown-up son and his friend, and her son-in-law -- also appears largely clueless.

The show is a perhaps unintentional demonstration of how little work some of those "hard-working" people of Hollywood really do. Larry David has spoofed this, with bitter hilarity, in "Curb Your Enthusiasm," but in "The Real Roseanne Show," no one really seems aware of the absurdities: meeting after meeting after meeting, each one ending when Barr gets bored or irritated -- or, of course, hungry.

Perhaps the uneventfulness of the show is supposed to be self-mockingly funny. Very little happens and only minuscule amounts of progress are made in preparing the cable cooking program. The camera captures such trivialities as Johnny, Barr's recently acquired Web site crony, asking the limo driver to pull over so he can jump out and urinate. Earlier, he'd told an offscreen interviewer, apparently in earnest, that to him, Barr is "just so deep." Among his compositions, he says, is one called "Down at the Doughnut Farm."

At a meeting, Barr reminds everyone attending that "I'm the genius," then later complains that "nobody listens to anything I say." She says so much, and yet so little. Her new goal in life, she insists, is simply to "be nice." If so, why doesn't she be really, really nice and just fade the hell away?

Kellirippa

Saturday, August 09, 2003 - 10:04 am EditMoveDeleteIP
...ouch...so, I'm guessing Tom Shales of the Washington Post didn't like the show??

Jan

Saturday, August 09, 2003 - 01:43 pm EditMoveDeleteIP
here's an interview from this week's People magazine re this show:

"I feel funnier than ever," says Barr (at home). "My comedy is more mature, more thoughtful. I think it's because I got the anger out."
(Neal Preston )
Everyone likes to set goals with their personal trainer. Roseanne Barr was no exception. "I told him, 'Stop coming here,'" she says, recalling the instructor's second visit to her home earlier this year. "He kept thinking it was a joke and it wasn't." Finally, he got the message. "I told him it was nothing personal; I'm done."

Actually, she's just getting started. Again. After taking time off to get her personal life back in shape, Barr is back on TV in The Real Roseanne Show, an ABC reality show about the creation of Domestic Goddess, her second new series, a cooking show ("Well, more of an eating show," she admits) debuting Sept. 8 on ABC Family. Barr, 50, describes Real — which features everyone from her rabbi to her extended family — as "white-trash Martha Stewart" and says, "I thought it might be cool to make people laugh at how dumb we are. My real life is funnier than anything on TV. "

But not as tumultuous as it used to be. After her syndicated talk show was canceled in 2000, she moved to a five-bedroom home in Rolling Hills, Calif., 40 miles from Beverly Hills, to detox from all things Hollywood. She also added Barr back to her name, after tiring of explaining to customs and credit officials why she didn't have a last name. And with the help of her rabbi and the Jewish mystical faith Kabbalah, "I've been concentrating on trying to grow and live a better life," she says. "Now I wish people well instead of going, 'that motherf----- owes me money.'"

The change has thrilled family and friends, who distinctly recall Barr's penchant for abruptly firing staff from her hit sitcom Roseanne. "She's mellower, but she's kept her edge," says comic pal Louie Anderson. She is also letting go of old grudges: These days her first husband, Bill Pentland, works as her handyman, and his wife, Becky, who married Pentland in 2000, is Barr's personal assistant. "I like to see what people do when I introduce her," says Barr with a laugh.

Still, notes Real Roseanne producer R.J. Cutler, "some days she's more successful at it than others. The days she's successful are very pleasant; the other days, you find the best way to get through. Doughnuts play a huge role."

So does her new boyfriend, musician Johnny Argent. The Tucson-based Argent, 54, began posting messages in an open forum on Barr's Web site in late 2001. They spoke for a year and finally began dating in January. "She turns into a 16-year-old kid when she talks about him," says Becky Pentland. Indeed, Barr gushes, "I never had a boyfriend or husband that thought I was really cute. I'm definitely in love. This is mature, it's not crazy."

Not so her three previous marriages. "As soon as I'd hate them, I'd marry them," says Barr, who divorced Pentland, 52, in 1990 after a 16-year marriage. She immediately wed Tom Arnold ("It was all crazy — I don't know why I thought it was okay") before splitting in 1994. A year later she married her bodyguard Ben Thomas. Their union produced son Buck, now 8, but Barr and Thomas "weren't a good match," she says, and they divorced in '02. In contrast, her relationship with Argent "is about two individuals who respect each other," says her son Jake Pentland, now a producer on Domestic Goddess, "whereas (with Arnold and Thomas), it was 'What can you do for me?'"

Barr (who has three kids with Pentland: Jessica, 28, Jenny, 27, and Jake, 25) might enjoy romance more at middle age, but raising Buck is a different matter. "We're not meant to be parents when we're 50," she says. "I can't go chasing after him like I did my other ones. I go, 'Let's watch cartoons,' so I can just lay there."

But she's put herself back into action, doing a few comedy gigs to hone her first stand-up act in 10 years. And if the career moves don't pan out, no matter. "I got great kids, a great boyfriend, and I'm gorgeous and thin," she says. "I can't do no better."

— JASON LYNCH
— MONICA RIZZO in Los Angeles

Jan

Saturday, August 09, 2003 - 01:45 pm EditMoveDeleteIP
OUCH again..here is People's review of the show itself:


I'm an exhibitionist," Roseanne Barr acknowledges on this curious new reality series. "I have a huge ego. I need attention." Well, that pretty much sums up The Real Roseanne Show. Good night, folks. All right, it's not quite so simple. We need to explain what reality means in Roseanne's world. This show follows the comedian and her entourage — including son Jake, son-in-law Jeff, boyfriend Johnny and first husband Bill — as they labor to launch Domestic Goddess, a cooking and lifestyle series starring Roseanne that's slated to debut next month on the ABC Family cable network. Consider this an extended, improvisational promo for that show (which sounds vaguely promising). Or look at it as The Osbournes with fewer bleeps. The theme is spelled out at the start: Can the former sitcom queen and daytime talk show host make a TV comeback without reconfirming her reputation as a temperamental tyrant? Roseanne's lips insist she wants to be calmer and more considerate this time around, while her eyes say she may start firing the flunkies and smashing the china any minute. Neither side of Roseanne seems real because she always appears to be playing, rather than being, herself. Worse, the character isn't very funny. About the only chuckles in the first two episodes came from watching Jake and Jeff goof off. I can picture them as sitcom slackers, dodging an explosive boss.

BOTTOM LINE: Real waste of time


Funny thing is, I liked the show a lot. Guess that tells you how bad my taste is.

Scorpiomoon

Saturday, August 09, 2003 - 02:42 pm EditMoveDeleteIP
"... the same old overweening, self-obsessed shrew."

LOL!

Tom Shales is my new favorite journalist. :)

Kellirippa

Saturday, August 09, 2003 - 03:45 pm EditMoveDeleteIP
Oh My!! I liked it! If she's the white trash Martha Stewart...that must make me the white trash Roseanne!!

Dee

Sunday, August 10, 2003 - 09:47 pm EditMoveDeleteIP
What's so ironic is Roseanne is planning a cooking show when her stomach is the size of a walnut due to weight loss surgery. You know how a cook tastes food during cooking? That would be an entire meal for her!

Jan

Wednesday, August 13, 2003 - 03:12 pm EditMoveDeleteIP
Dee, I saw her on the View today and they asked her that very question as she sat eating fried chicken on thier couch! She said she mananges to eat 10 to 12 times a day to keep her weight up :):)

What to do tonight...roseanne and BB and Paradise Hotel all on at the same time! BB is on again here at 10 but that is opposite The Family. (and at 8 we have race to the altar. What a reality TV night!)

Thank God for VCR's and posters here. I guess Surreal will post Paradise hotel and Hermie and others will do BB but no one will do Roseanne. So I will watch Roseanne and read the posts for PH and BB to tide me over till I get to watch my tapes!

Jan

Wednesday, August 13, 2003 - 06:37 pm EditMoveDeleteIP
I like this show..but if this is how a Cooking show , or any other show, is really put together and sold..all I can say is WOW. How unprofessional

Scorpiomoon

Wednesday, August 13, 2003 - 08:40 pm EditMoveDeleteIP
You know, I come across many of you guys in other threads and I always respect your thoughts and opinions. But man, this show is hideous. Absolutely hideous. I don't understand why you like it.

I caught bits of it during BB commercials. Suggesting food critics eat food out of dumpsters? Roseanne gaurding a box of doughnuts like her life depended on it? Roseanne going to a Farmer's Market and eating her way through the place? It was so revolting and so unsettling.

Curlyq

Wednesday, August 13, 2003 - 10:10 pm EditMoveDeleteIP
I think that was the point of this episode. This executive producer was showing bad judgment and her sons were catching on to it. The Farmer's Market thing was a disaster because I think this producer wanted her to interact with these much lower income people by haggling and stealing stuff. Roseanne refused to do that knowing how horrible that would look and instead just kept buying food from them. When he gave that pitch and made that comment about dumpsters she knew that was the wrong thing to say, but I think her resolution to stay calm and not blow up at people is working against her now. Judging by the previews for next week, it looks like she might fire this guy.

If you only watch bits of the show it won't look like much, but if you follow it all the way through you can kind of see the story developing. The son doesn't want this guy making his mother look like a fool, and she's starting to catch on that this producer doesn't have good ideas or her best interest at heart.