‘Roseanne’ Producer Opted for ‘Relative Peace and Quiet of Beirut’ After Tom Arnold Tried to Strangle Him

For producers on the hit ‘90s sitcom Roseanne, a day at the office could be like working in a war zone.

It started with Matt Williams, a veteran of The Cosby Show who was brought in to guide sitcom rookie Roseanne Barr during her show’s first season. He wanted to call the show Life and Stuff, arguing that a self-titled show would give Roseanne too much power. He was right about Barr wanting to throw her weight around — she was trying to get Williams fired after only three episodes, according to Vanity Fair. 

Barr’s behavior was obnoxious from the get-go — “She was not shy about her bodily functions,” revealed one ABC exec — but the show was a hit and she nearly always got her way. By December of the first year, she issued an ultimatum: Williams goes or she goes.

Williams went, and in came Jeff Harris, a veteran producer of sitcoms like Diff’rent Strokes. Things were peaceful for a month or two, but soon went off the rails once again. By December of the show’s second season, Barr was telling the Today show that she was quitting Roseanne.

The problem this time? Harris wanted to fire Tom Arnold, the inexperienced boyfriend whom Roseanne hired to be a writer on the show. Harris had good reasons to axe Arnold — his excessive drug use was problematic, he didn’t contribute much in the writers’ room, and his presence was distracting Barr from the business of filming the show. 

But Roseanne and Arnold had gotten engaged — moving on from the guy was easier said than done. The strain became so great that the show’s production company, Carsey-Werner, brought in a third executive producer with two episodes to go in the show’s second season. (That was Jay Daniel, the peacemaker who had managed to broker peace between Cybill Shepherd and executive producer Glen Gordon Caron on Moonlighting.)

There was one other minor issue for Harris: Arnold allegedly tried to strangle him when Harris questioned his authority to edit the show’s scripts, according to Vulture. The physical confrontation was the final straw, and Harris quit the show, publishing a sarcastic resignation letter in Variety for the world to see.

March 27, 1990

To my friends at Carsey-Werner Company, ABC, to the cast, crew and staff of ‘Roseanne’: 

My sincere and heartfelt thanks to all of you. I have chosen not to return to the show next season. Instead, my wife and I have decided to share a vacation in the relative peace and quiet of Beirut.

JEFF HARRIS 

Executive Producer

While Harris departed for calmer waters, the chaos continued on the set of Roseanne. In subsequent seasons, Barr and Arnold made the show’s writers wear numbered T-shirts so they wouldn’t have to remember their names. It was also a power play: “I wanted to strip them of their huge, colossal self-entitlement,” Barr told Entertainment Weekly. “‘Hey, you’re just a cog in the wheel here! It’s not about you.’ I think they learned something from it.”

Variety didn’t publish the writers’ resignation letters. But there were plenty of them.