Less than 24 hours after the “Roseanne” reboot was canceled, former Trump campaign aide Michael Caputo began plotting ways to get her back on air.
Caputo is the chief marketing officer of an online streaming TV startup called Bond, which aims to fund film and television programming through “crowd-investing.” He told The Daily Beast that he and his colleagues plan “to reach out to Roseanne [Barr] immediately” in the wake of the cancellation of her ABC show on Tuesday over a series of racist and anti-Semitic tweets. (Despite the controversy surrounding Barr, the rebooted Roseanne earned huge ratings and plenty of headlines for its star’s support for President Donald Trump. Caputo, who helped run Trump’s New York campaign, hopes to capitalize on that popularity. If he were to do so, it would be a coup for Bond, which was founded last year but has yet to begin airing content on its streaming service.)
“We always planned on reaching out to Roseanne eventually,” Caputo told The Daily Beast. “Now it’s sooner rather than later.”Some of the shows being considered for this fledgling network include such former luminaries as The Tom Green Show, Ren and Stimpy, Barney & Friends, Cop Rock, Manimal, Here Comes Honey Boo Boo, Jersey Shore, the Michael Richards Show, The Mullets, Joey, Kojak, Living With Fran, Cavemen, Who's Your Daddy, Bionic Woman, Rosie Live, American Gladiators, The Hasselhoffs, Osbournes Reloaded, Chopper One, Get Christie Love, Grady, Logan's Run, Lucas Tanner, Project UFO, The Snoop Sisters, Who's Watching the Kids, Max Headroom, Greatest American Hero, Sledge Hammer, Blue Thunder, Airwolf, Alien Nation, Stingray, Seaquest, Matt Houston and The Paul Reiser Show!
A show on Caputo’s streaming service would be a major step down in terms of audience size for Barr, whose show set viewership records in its short-lived tenure. Caputo says Bond is aiming for 150 original content creators to draw 75,000 paying subscribers in its first year. By contrast, the first episode of ABC’s Roseanne reboot drew more than 27 million viewers.
But Roseanne has become persona non grata in Hollywood, even more so after a series of tweets that called liberal financier George Soros, who is Jewish, a Nazi collaborator and compared Valerie Jarrett, an African American adviser to former president Barack Obama, to an ape. A new home at Bond would, potentially, insulate Barr from backlash to her consistently controversial politics and public statements.
Caputo, for one, views it as a cleaner ideological fit than ABC ever was. In slideshow presentations pitching its streaming service to various potential investors, Bond even used the Roseanne reboot as a model for the type of programming that the company could support. Caputo said that model was used explicitly to lure conservative-minded backers eager to tip the balance of political power in Hollywood.
jBY THE WAY: Roseanne Barr fired off another round of controversial tweets throughout the night in which she attacked the co-stars on her canceled show for “throwing [her] under the bus.” Barr, whose revived series got the axe from ABC on Tuesday after a racist post about former Obama staffer Valerie Jarrett, lashed out at two of her TV children, Michael Fishman and Sara Gilbert, in a string of furious tweets. In response to Fishman’s statement about her “reprehensible and intolerable” tweets, Barr said, in eerily Trump-like syntax: “I created the platform for that inclusivity and you know it. ME . You throw me under the bus. Nice!” Responding to Gilbert’s tweet about her disappointment in Barr, the actress wrote: “Wow! unreal.” (Earlier in the night, Barr blamed her condemned tweets on the fact that she’d taken sleeping pill Ambien.)
The way I see it anyway!
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