Chuck Lorre says Roseanne Barr “fundamentally hated” having other people write her dialogue during his time working on Roseanne.
“It was malice,” Lorre told Jesse Tyler Ferguson on the Oct. 6 episode of Dinner’s on Me, when the host asked how he managed to keep working in such a difficult environment.
Lorre joined the sitcom in 1990 after writing for children’s television. He went on to create or co-create shows including Grace Under Fire, Dharma & Greg, Two and a Half Men and The Big Bang Theory.
The interview comes ahead of his memoir, Sitcom, due Oct. 13 from Dey Street Books. The book covers his television career alongside addiction, chronic illness and marriage, according to its announcement in People.
Why Lorre Kept Coming Back to the Writers’ Room
Lorre recalled working 60- and 70-hour weeks on the show. Before landing the job, he had experienced what he estimated were 15 or 20 years of poverty and health problems.
“Under no circumstances was I going to go back to scrambling to pay the rent,” he said, according to Entertainment Weekly.
Lorre attributed the tension to Barr’s transition from becoming a star with her own stand-up material to working on a television production that required a staff to write each episode. He believed the conflict would have existed regardless of which writers were hired.
Barr Described a Fight Over Her Comic Voice
In a May 2011 essay for New York, Barr said she supplied jokes and insisted they reach the scripts. Sometimes, she wrote, the writers told her the pages had been lost.
She described fighting to preserve the working-class mother she had developed onstage. She also praised the show’s “mostly great writers” for helping make comedy about families’ economic struggles.
Earlier that year, Barr had criticized Lorre in a blog post about his public dispute with Two and a Half Men star Charlie Sheen. As TheWrap reported in March 2011, she said she had fired Lorre and complained that his dialogue could leave actors “stone cold soul dead.”
What ‘Roseanne’ Taught Lorre About Writing
Lorre credited Barr with making him a better writer in a January 2005 interview with TVWeek, conducted when Two and a Half Men was in its second season.
He said she could distinguish believable family material from a glib sitcom joke. Keeping the job required writers to meet that standard, and he valued her refusal to fall back on familiar formulas.
“It was a nightmare, but I’m glad I did it,” he told TVWeek in 2005.
In his 2012 interview with the Television Academy, Lorre also discussed using experiences from his own life for Roseanne storylines and writing comedy that did not have to deliver a moral lesson.