Chuck Lorre Calls Writing on Roseanne 'Malice' After 70-Hour Weeks
Chuck Lorre has called his stint writing on Roseanne “malice”, recalling 60- to 70-hour weeks, every week.
The comments came on Dinner’s on Me, the podcast hosted by Jesse Tyler Ferguson, as reported by Variety on 7 October 2026. It is a blunt look back from one of television’s most prolific comedy makers.
Lorre spent two seasons as a writer on the ABC sitcom before creating Two and a Half Men and The Big Bang Theory. He told Ferguson he stuck out the punishing schedule because he had come off 15 to 20 years of poverty and health problems. He did not want to go back to scrambling to pay rent.
Money kept him there. Joy did not.
He said star Roseanne Barr “hated that there were writers” on the programme and fundamentally hated saying lines written by other people. Barr had broken through as a stand-up comedian, writing her own jokes and building herself into a superstar on her own words and writing. That history, Lorre suggested, made a traditional writers’ room — where a team writes and rewrites scripts for the cast — a difficult fit.
Roseanne first ran from 1988 to 1997, centred on a working-class family in Illinois. It was then revived, meaning new episodes were made after the original run had ended, for a nine-episode season that aired in 2018. That revival was cancelled in 2018 after Barr posted a racist message on social media. The follow-up series without her, The Conners, ran for seven seasons from 2018 to 2025.
What makes this stand out is the labour behind the laughs. A network sitcom supports a crew of more than a hundred people, and long hours in the writers’ room set the pace for everyone else. Lorre’s version is simple. He stayed for the steady wage, not for fun.
You can hear the full conversation on Dinner’s on Me, which iHeart lists as Ferguson’s interview show about working on famous sitcoms. Friction between Barr and Lorre is not new. The two have been at odds since his time on the show, as noted in earlier background reporting by TV Guide.
