Chuck Lorre has opened up about the hostility he faced from Roseanne Barr during his time on her hit sitcom.
Lorre, 73, who spent two seasons as a writer and producer on “Roseanne,” told Jesse Tyler Ferguson on Tuesday’s “Dinner’s On Me” podcast that Barr, 73, “fundamentally hated that other people wrote words that she would say.” The veteran showrunner, who later created “The Big Bang Theory,” “Two and a Half Men” and “Mom,” described the dynamic as built on malice rather than mere creative friction.
“Roseanne hated that there were writers,” he said on the podcast. “Fundamentally hated that other people wrote words that she would say.”
Lorre traced the conflict to Barr’s roots as a stand-up comedian who had built her own stardom through her own material. “She made herself a superstar based on her words, her writing,” he explained. “Then transition to a television show where [you] can’t do it alone. It’s impossible. That transition was not going to happen.”
The producer argued that the very premise of a writers room clashed with Barr’s identity as a comic. “It was the premise of other people putting words in a stand-up comedian’s mouth,” he shared. “It’s fundamentally flawed. There’s very few comics that can do that.”
Barr and “any writing staff” of hers carried what Lorre called “a built-in animosity.” Yet he stayed on the ABC hit for two years despite the strain, driven by the memory of nearly two decades of financial struggle. “I navigated because I’d had, I don’t know, 15, 20 years of poverty and health issues and all sorts of stuff, and I was not going to go back,” he said on the podcast. “Under no circumstances was I going to go back to scrambling to pay the rent.”
The grueling schedule only compounded the tension. “That is why I put up with it,” Lorre added. “60, 70-hour weeks every week.”
The pair’s acrimony has stretched across decades. In a 2011 blog post, Barr claimed she “fired” Lorre “for being a big drunk on my show” and wrote that his “lines could choke a f—ing horse, and render any actor who recites them stone cold soul dead.” Lorre responded the following year in an Archive of American Television interview, calling the sitcom “a very volatile environment” and noting that Barr “just hated” one of his scripts.
Barr’s original sitcom ran on ABC from 1988 to 1997. The network revived it in 2018, but the reboot collapsed within two months when Barr posted a racist tweet attacking former Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett. ABC salvaged the franchise as “The Conners,” continuing without its namesake star through seven seasons until 2025.
Barr has remained combative with former colleagues. She recently attacked Michael Fishman, 44, who played her TV son and publicly condemned her racist tweets, branding him a “brainwashed bigot.” She claimed she had forced producers to bring him back for the reboot, writing, “They wanted to get rid of you in the reboot and I made them take you back. F–k you, you little f–king putz.”
Lorre’s podcast appearance marks his most detailed public account of the “Roseanne” writers room dynamic, framing years of industry lore about the show’s tumultuous production in stark personal terms.
