Roseanne Barr will headline the new comedy Meemaw alongside right-leaning stars, her first major TV role more than eight years after ABC canceled her.
Daily Mail reports that the 73-year-old comedian is set to lead Meemaw, a series built around a fiercely patriotic prepper grandma with a mixed-race family who aims to save America, take down a criminal empire, and throw her granddaughter the perfect Bat Mitzvah.
Joining her are Drea de Matteo as her on-screen daughter, Randy Quaid as her husband, plus Jon Lovitz and Tony Hinchcliffe, performers who have drawn headlines in recent years for backing Donald Trump or breaking with Hollywood orthodoxy.
The project marks Barr’s biggest screen return since ABC killed her 2018 reboot after a single offensive tweet, even though the show ranked as the third highest-rated on television that year.
Barr is framing Meemaw as bolder than her earlier hit.
She said the series will be “every bit as revolutionary as The Roseanne Show, if not more.”
"I thought now would be a great time for people to actually hear from a Jew,"
Barr added that her “work has improved with time” and teased bipartisan targets.
"I’ve got some great jokes about Republicans that the lefties are gonna love,"
Daily Mail said it contacted representatives for Barr and de Matteo for comment.
The original Roseanne ran from 1988 to 1997 and made Barr a working-class comedy star. The 2018 revival brought back John Goodman, Sara Gilbert, and Laurie Metcalf. Then Barr posted that Valerie Jarrett, an African-American adviser to Barack and Michelle Obama, “looked like the ‘Muslim brotherhood & planet of the apes had a baby.’”
Barr first defended the joke, then publicly apologized to Jarrett “for making a bad joke” and left Twitter, now X. ABC canceled the series anyway. Her agent dropped her. On the spin-off The Conners, which ran seven seasons until 2025, her character was killed off by an opioid overdose.
She returned to stand-up and launched a podcast while mainstream Hollywood kept its distance.
De Matteo, 54, the Sopranos actress turned OnlyFans star and host of the Ultrafree podcast, identifies as an independent. She voiced support for Trump and voted for him in 2024. She was dropped by her agent and pushed out of Hollywood after refusing COVID vaccine mandates. She is a mom of two.
Quaid, 76, once called for a do-over of the 2020 election after Trump lost to Joe Biden. Lovitz has made recent headlines for Trump support. Hinchcliffe, in 2024, compared Puerto Rico to a “floating island of garbage” at a Trump campaign rally.
None of that résumé is accidental casting. Meemaw gathers performers Hollywood sidelined for the same cultural fights that ended Barr’s last network run.
Network, streamer, studio, filming location, and air date remain unreported. Page Six first flagged the star-studded lineup; the broader deal terms have not been laid out in public.
Barr’s first series made blue-collar life funny without apology. After eight years in exile for a single bad joke, she is back with a prepper grandma, a Bat Mitzvah plot, and co-stars who refused to kneel. Hollywood’s gatekeepers already showed what they do to that kind of voice. Audiences get to decide what they want next.
