Roseanne Barr is back, and she didn’t wait for Hollywood to let her in. The comedian has wrapped production on an eight-episode family comedy called “Meemaw,” filmed in Austin, Texas, eight years after Disney showed her the door.
The cast is stacked. Randy Quaid plays her husband, Drea de Matteo plays her daughter, Omar Gooding plays her son-in-law, and Doug Jones also stars. Jon Lovitz, Tony Hinchcliffe, and Kim Congdon are set for guest appearances. Hinchcliffe, in what might be the most on-brand casting of all time, plays Satan.
Barr plays a woman from a liberal East Coast Jewish family who gets disinherited and rebuilds her life in Texas as the matriarch of a mixed-race prepper family. Her big mission in the show is throwing her granddaughter an over-the-top bat mitzvah. Oscar winner Mo’Nique helped Barr find 12-year-old Instagram personality Indy Bugg for the granddaughter role. “She was only 12, and I about fell over that I was able to get her,” Barr said. “She’s such a star.”
The whole project is semi-autobiographical, and Barr describes the tone as, “It’s now more John Waters.” She also raised the money herself from private investors and mounted it as a fully union production, quietly beginning filming in late 2025. She had said previously, “If Hollywood doesn’t buy it, then I’m just gonna make it myself.” That is essentially what she did.
She even tried to get Elon Musk involved financially. “He wouldn’t call me back,” she said. “Like, ‘Can I get some assistance over here, man? I got fired for a text that was up for two hours that nobody saw.'” Points for trying.
For those who need a refresher, ABC revived “Roseanne” in 2018 and it finished its first season as the top scripted primetime series among adults 18 to 49. Then Disney fired Barr over a social media post about former Obama administration adviser Valerie Jarrett. Barr apologized and deleted her Twitter account. The show was retooled without her as “The Conners,” and Barr spent the next several years doing stand-up, podcasting, and developing what would eventually become this new series. You can get the full background on Roseanne Barr’s television comeback through Roseanne Barr’s Meemaw production.
Nobody is safe from the punchlines, and Barr is upfront about that. “I make fun of everybody ’cause everybody deserves to be made fun of who’s in power,” she said. “So, I’ve got some great jokes about Republicans that the lefties are gonna love. I’m an equal opportunity destroyer.” She also wrote jokes for her self-described woke daughters, just like she did on the original show. That even-handed approach is basically what made “Roseanne” a cultural institution in the first place.
She summed up the whole spirit of the show pretty well. “I want everybody who disagrees in a family to sit in the same room and just laugh and go, ‘Yeah, maybe I was an a, hole that time. Well, you were an a, hole this time. Oh, we’re all a, holes. Let’s get a beer.'”
No word yet on where “Meemaw” will land or when it will air, but with eight episodes in the can and a cast like that, the audience is already out there waiting. Cancel culture took her network. It didn’t take her fans. Drop a comment below and let us know if you’ll be tuning in.
