I Thought Big Name Celebs Never Really Get Canceled, Then I Saw the 2018 Roseanne Numbers
I used to roll my eyes at the whole idea that a famous person could actually lose everything over one bad tweet. Then last week I fell down a rabbit hole and read that Roseanne Barr's show got canned in May 2018 after one racist tweet, and it was pulling in like 18 million viewers at the time, which was huge for ABC. I always figured stars like that had enough money and fans to just wait it out and come back in a year. But she basically lost the reboot, the royalties, and her agency dropped her in a matter of days, and she never got a real prime time comeback after that. That's when it clicked for me that canceling isn't always just noise on twitter, sometimes it's a company doing cold math about ads and sponsors. I was one of the people saying cancel culture is overblown, and honestly I still think it gets misused a lot, but seeing those specific numbers made me admit it can actually end a career. So was Roseanne a fair cancel or a business decision dressed up as one? I keep going back and forth on it.