Roseanne Barr’s son, Jake Pentland, slammed Michael Fishman after the “Roseanne” actor claimed the show’s reboot was “rightfully cancelled” due to Barr’s controversial 2018 tweets.
Pentland told TMZ on Wednesday — a day after Fishman shared a lengthy Instagram reel explaining why he felt the comedian’s controversial 2018 twitter rant continues to cause “collateral damage” — that while he agrees she was wrong for the social media posts, he feels it was Barr herself who took the brunt of the backlash.
According to the outlet, Pentland claimed cast members took her tweets out of context and allegedly “conspired” to take her sitcom revival away from her.
Furthermore, per TMZ, Pentland claimed the cast failed to ask Barr “what she meant” and “prevented her from publicly defending herself.”
Pentland and reps for ABC did not immediately respond to Page Six’s requests for comment on Wednesday evening.
Public backlash erupted back in 2018, when Barr shared a since-deleted tweet comparing former President Barack Obama’s advisor, Valerie Jarrett, to an “ape.”
Barr claimed she’s been on Ambien and that she thought Jarrett was white — though ABC swiftly moved to cancel the reboot after only one season.
Barr later explained in a 2018 interview with Sean Hannity that her tweets were “about asking for accountability from the previous administration about the Iran deal, which Valerie Jarrett is the author of, and that was what was in my head.”
She added at the time that her reaction to the backlash “was shock that they were saying it was racial, when it’s political.”
In a 2018 podcast interview with Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, Barr apologized for the controversy, acknowledging that she had to “face that it hurt people.”
“When you hurt people even unwillingly there’s no excuse,” she said. “I don’t want to run off and blather on with excuses. But I apologize to anyone who thought, or felt offended and who thought that I meant something that I, in fact, did not mean. It was my own ignorance, and there’s no excuse for that ignorance.”
“The Conners,” a reimagining of the comedic family dynamic without Barr, ended in 2025 after seven seasons.
In Fishman’s Instagram reel on Monday, the former child actor — who played DJ Conner in both the original and reboot series — said that “After eight years” of fielding “ignorant and inaccurate” defensive comments about Barr’s past controversy, “turning the other cheek really isn’t helping.”
“So, I guess the world failed to learn the lesson,” he told fans. “So I’m going to point out. We are perpetuating a lie, and people are using a political smokescreen to justify the indefensible.”
Fishman added, “Those justifications, they’re leading to real consequences. Real crimes.”
“Dehumanizing people is never a joke,” he went on. “In this case, there was no joke. And the show was rightfully canceled.”
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