A Cautionary Tale

How do you get a highly rated show cancelled? Go on a twitter rant. Throughout this day and age, I’m still amazed that people will continue to do stupid things regarding social media. But that’s going to keep happening over and over again, isn’t it? I might as well post a good educational post in this blog of mine about how not to be an idiot online and why you should always be careful with what you say and do anywhere. Do you want to get fired?

This post will largely go over one example, but it applies in a lot of cases. Basically, there was this show called Roseanne that was popular for some odd reason. A lot of things happened here that I don’t really understand, get, or even care about. After the show ended, it was rebooted filling promos with slightly annoying music and a really annoying laugh. It got extremely high ratings and was instantly renewed. What could go wrong?

Well, political parts of the show and political leanings of the main star made things a bit iffy. Then, there was a least one tweet that caused ABC to cancel their highest rated show. It was deemed racist and problems didn’t stop there. First she double downed on the statement before deleting the tweet but not before it was widely spread among people. She apologized, but not for the tweet. She was upset that all of her co-workers were out of a job. And while she might have been sorry for the tweet, she was soon back to her old ways tweeting random crap again.

Of course, it is not without controversy on the other side too. It seems that Roseanne suffers from some mental problems and thinks that a medicine she was on could have lead to this rant. It could be like how the sign language interrupter at the Nelson Mandela memorial who wasn’t using any real sign language was suffering from the effects of schizophrenia. However, people aren’t buying that it could because of this medicine that it happened. It could have been other mental problems that this happened. Or it could just be a person refusing to own their mistake.

People think that this could just be a double standard between how Republicans and Democrats are treated. I don’t buy that. Ask Anthony Wiener if a Democrat has never suffered because of posting what they shouldn’t online. But I’d rather not get into political things in this blog. I have another blog for that. But they might have a point about people who might not suffer from the same fate because of the same thing. But look at all these sexual harassment scandals. Things have to be treated differently each time they happen because it always is a different response for each different controversy.

I might be losing my point here, although I’m not sure that I have a point here anyways. Maybe it is that people have said and will continue to say dumb things online and may or may not suffer because of it. It is hard to tell for sure in each different event what will or could happen. But I have the feeling that this will not be a lesson that people learn. It is like how a former junkie could die from an overdose. I have posted dumb things online. I may continue to do that. I haven’t done anything that’s gotten me fired from anything. It could happen, but I hope that it doesn’t.

Something that remains to be seen is if the decision to cancel the show will be reversed and they will end up going forward with a new season of the show after all. But would that be against the principle of what the things mean? Unlike what the NFL might think, there are more important things than ratings. You can’t change policy just to fit what you want it to mean. It is hard to tell what to do.

If there’s a point to this whole blog post, it’s this: Always be careful what you say and do online. You don’t want to become the next in a set of cautionary tales against why you can’t just say any terrible thing and expect to be okay with it. Your one tweet can cause hundreds of people to lose their jobs. It may just cause you to lose one: your own. But you don’t want Mister T’s catchphrase to apply to you. Others’ mistakes can teach you what not to do.