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Everyone fell for roseanne's big premiere rating. even the president of the united states. people always do. and of course the ratings collapsed after that, as they almost always do. they almost always go down after the big highly promoted premiere. roseanne's ratings were no longer worth today's burden for disney and abc. they didn't have to be brave to cancel "roseanne." they just had to be good business executives, because what roseanne said today was going to infect their entire business. every abc actor appearing in front of the television critics association and every public gathering wh...

So even though ratings had dropped, this was a show that was right at top of the ratings, and that they were centering their fall strategy on. so to have them cancel it as quickly as they did and for the reasons that they did i think it really did surprise me. i'm quite cynical about television, and i didn't expect them to make that move. >> and soraya, it seems like it might make a big difference when you have a black woman in the room during these kinds of discussions, as we had today with the president of abc entertainment. >> right. i mean, these sorts of remarks would have been inappropri...

Who also said she was calling her agent to say she was going to quit the show when word came that the show had been canceled. so abc might have also had to deal with several people connected to the show quitting the cast and quitting behind the scenes, which is something else they probably didn't want to have to deal with. >> soraya mcdonald and eric deggans, thank you both for joining me tonight. i really appreciate it. >> thank you. coming up, congressman ted lieu, who might just be the house of representatives' most successful and prolific tweeter as well as an important democratic legisl...

He is also npr's tv critic. you have spent some time writing and thinking about this today, and tweeting about it. >> i have. >> let me ask you. what did you think was going to happen? let's go all the way back to 11:00 a.m. and it seems like weeks ago. and did you see this coming, that abc would just pull the plug on this hit that they had? >> you know, i'm not entirely sure because usually what happens in these sorts of situations is that you see a round of very serious apologies, and that was the first thing we saw from rose sean quite quickly was basically apologizing for make a bad joke i...

Of them, every one of them was going to be asked about roseanne's comments every single time they appeared. what was viola davis going to say? was abc going to put viola davis through that? what was chandra rhymes goishan say? was abc going to put chanda rhymes through that? abc spent months building anticipation for roseanne's return, and it worked. the show's reboot debuted to an audience of 27.3 million viewers, absolutely gobsmacking numbers in our age streaming, dvr and video on demand. it's all too predictable ugly collapse should leave the executives of america's network seriously askin...