Roseanne Barr's character in "The Conners" was killed off Tuesday night and the actress is not happy about it.
"The Conners," a spinoff of canceled sitcom "Roseanne," premiered on ABC and showed the family grieving after Barr's character died from what they initially thought was a heart attack but turned out to be an opioid overdose.
Barr reacted by tweeting "I AIN'T DEAD, BITCHES!!!!" She also released a statement, which said: "We regret that ABC chose to cancel 'Roseanne' by killing off the Roseanne Conner character. That it was done through an opioid overdose lent an unnecessary grim and morbid dimension to an otherwise happy family show," according to a Reuters report.
In the first episode of "The Conners," called "Keep On Truckin,'" the Conner family are seen three weeks after Roseanne's funeral and discovering the opioid painkillers she had been hiding. Midway through, it is revealed her death was caused by an overdose.
The original "Roseanne" ran from 1988 to 1997 and was revived by ABC in March 2018, with Barr's character shown as a supporter of President Donald Trump. But in May, ABC canceled the show after Barr sent a racist tweet about Barack Obama's former advisor Valerie Jarrett, which compared her to an ape.
Barr apologized but said the tweet had been misunderstood. "I made a mistake obviously. It cost me everything, my life's work. And I paid the price for it. But no, I did not know she (Jarrett) was black," she told Fox News host Sean Hannity in July.
Bob Iger, the chief executive of Disney, which owns ABC, apologized to Jarrett in May. President Trump weighed in at the time, acknowledging Iger's apology on Twitter and adding: "He never called President Donald J Trump to apologize for all the HORRIBLE statements made and said about me on ABC."
Trump's tweet showed his penchant for jumping into heated racial and cultural matters — often without condemning the racist behavior at issue.
- CNBC's Jacob Pramuck contributed to this report.