Tom Arnold trash-talks after Chuck Lorre claims ‘Roseanne’ writers penned star’s episodes
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- Tom Arnold took shots at former “Roseanne” writer-producer Chuck Lorre on X.
- In his new memoir, Lorre claims that staff writers were ordered to write scripts credited to Tom Arnold and describes a hostile work environment.
- The dispute revives a turbulent “Roseanne” history: Lorre was fired after two years, Arnold later was dismissed amid his divorce from Barr, who was ousted from the reboot in 2018.
Actor Tom Arnold unleashed on Chuck Lorre on X in response to the former “Roseanne” writer-producer’s claims in his new memoir, “Sitcom.”
“He thinks he’s brilliant & beloved like Norman Lear but Chuck ‘Chuckles’ Lorre’s a terrible human, an angry dry drunk who lies every time he opens his mouth,” Arnold wrote Tuesday.
Arnold and the ’90s sitcom’s co-creator and titular star, Roseanne Barr, were married Jan. 20, 1990, four months after he first appeared on the show as a poker pal of Barr’s TV husband and four days after Barr’s real-life divorce from her husband of 14 years, William Pentland, was finalized.
Former musician, Scientologist and Charlie Sheen punching bag Chuck Lorre created some of the biggest sitcoms in television history. Now he’s written a dishy, thoughtful how-I-did-it memoir.
Barr and Arnold were hostile to their writing and producing colleagues on the show and the network, Lorre told the Los Angeles Times’ culture critic Mary McNamara in an interview published Tuesday, the day of the book’s release.
“We were punished, the writers,” Lorre told The Times. “The word ‘cruelty’ comes to mind. And I still don’t know why, why so much cruelty. It wasn’t like we didn’t want to make a great show. We were proud to be on that show.”
Hired in 1990 after Barr fired all of the show’s writers, Lorre recalls in the book that he had a rude awakening when he took the job.
“I was now the co–executive producer on the number one show on television. I swaggered into the office assigned to me and met Danny Jacobson (a world-class comedy writer who would go on to cocreate ‘Mad About You’ with, sorry, Paul — ‘My Two Dads’ — Reiser),” Lorre writes in “Sitcom.”
“Danny, having been fired by Roseanne for being talented, was packing up his stuff when I walked in. He showed me a sloppy, hand-scribbled couple of pages and explained this was a ‘script’ by the show’s new executive producer, Tom Arnold. It had been part of Danny’s job to write real scripts and put Tom’s name on the front page — as if Tom had written them,” Lorre continues. “Bob, myself, and several other staff writers would be ordered to do this on many occasions.... Was it a portent of bad things to come? You tell me.”
Roseanne Barr, serious and businesslike, settles into a couch in her suite in an elegant Westside hotel.
For her part, Barr admitted after the 1990 firings, “Yeah, I probably was difficult to work with, now looking back.”
“I don’t think I was as especially clear as I could have been,” Barr told former Times television writer Rick Du Brow in a November 1990 article. “It’s like being a woman and an administrator — I never had any background like that. I didn’t know how, like I do now, to go in and say, ‘This is what I want you to do.’ I think that’s common with women in business. I would go in there and try to get them to agree with me rather than tell them what I want to do.”
Arnold’s social media screed doesn’t directly address any of Lorre’s claims in the book but resorts to name-calling and his own claims against the producer, who went on to create or co-create sitcom hits including “Cybill,” “Dharma & Greg,” the Charlie Sheen-starring “Two and a Half Men” and “The Big Bang Theory” and its offshoots.
“He trashes Trump but he is Trump & he’s a bitter hack who actually believes his lame vanity cards at the end of his lame shows are Paddy Chayefsky worthy,” Arnold wrote, invoking the three-time Oscar-winning writer of “Network.” “Chuckle’s made $800,000,000 off the backs of very talented women & a naive cracked up Charlie Sheen (clean & sober since he’s not under Lorre’s strange, abusive tutelage) then trashes them all to make him feel cool but don’t worry, Chuck hates himself more than we ever could.”
Lorre’s accounts of Arnold in “Sitcom” included several other anecdotes, including one seemingly questioning the “True Lies” and “The Stupids” star’s trustworthiness.
“Executive Producer Tom was angrily explaining to Bob [Myer] and me that some bastard had stolen Roseanne’s love letters to him and sold them to the National Enquirer. His plan was to hire a private detective and get to the bottom of this treachery. And he did. It took one day. The detective found a cashed check for twenty-five grand from the National Enquirer made out to Tom Arnold. Mystery solved.”
Across town from the glitter and glamour of the Emmy Awards, Roseanne Barr, the star of one of TV’s most popular shows of the year, was holding court in a Beverly Hills theater, discussing her fall from grace and the theme of forgiveness.
Lorre was famously fired after two years on the show, which Arnold recalled in concluding his X post: “I wish everyone could’ve seen his arrogant, sad clown face the day Roseanne made me fire him.”
Barr later fired Arnold from “Roseanne” in 1994 amid their divorce. In 2018, after posting a racist tweet, Barr was fired from the “Roseanne” reboot, which was resurrected as spinoff “The Conners.”
