It could be said Roseanne has lived her life like one, extended reality TV show. Now, she'll star in one.
The outspoken comic, who shared intimate details in not one, but two autobiographies, and saw her three failed marriages turned into tabloid fodder, will return to primetime via her own Osbournes-Anna Nicole-esque reality series for ABC, today's Daily Variety reports.
The show could bow on the Alphabet, the network home to her long-running self-titled sitcom, for a minimum 13-week run starting in summer 2003, the paper says.
"I'm really, really excited to be back home at ABC," Roseanne said in a statement to the paper.
Unlike MTV's The Osbournes, which tracks an F-bomb-dropping family through the rock world and Rodeo Drive, or E!'s Anna Nicole, which tracks the former Playmate and her crew through the world of eating contests, pet psychics and Sin City lap dances, Roseanne's as-yet untitled half-hour show will be "the first reality comedy set in a workplace," executive producer R.J. Cutler tells Variety.
Exactly what that workplace will be has not yet been determined. The trade paper hints it could be a cooking or talk show as hosted by Roseanne.
Roseanne's already done the talk thing, of course. The Roseanne Show ran from 1998-2000, failing to mount a ratings challenge to the afternoon fiefdoms of Oprah Winfrey and, at the time, Rosie O'Donnell.
More successful was Roseanne's sitcom. Roseanne, about the deeply blue-collar Connor clan, ran on ABC from 1988-1997. Better than a top 10 show, it was prime-time's overall number one for the 1989-1990 season, and the top-rated comedy for the 1991-92 and 1992-93 seasons. While Roseanne never managed an Emmy nomination for Outstanding Comedy Series (a snub that beyond bugged its star), it earned the prestigious Humanitas Prize in 1993.
While Roseanne butted heads early and often with ABC and series execs, the sturdy show kept on keeping on, until the final 1996-97 season, when the Connors won the lottery, Roseanne Connor imagined herself as the star of, um, Roseambo, and ratings faltered. Roseanne tried to sell ABC on a new, post-Roseanne sitcom that would follow her character (sans the other Connors), but the network passed.
Roseanne, who turns 50 on November 3, dreamed up the notion for the new reality series, per Variety. She'll executive produce with Cutler.
Never to be confused with a closed book, Roseanne has already gotten real with the public about her plastic surgeries, her multiple personalities (as discussed in her 1994 tome, My Lives), and her incest-victim past (a past her parents deny ever happened).
We're not sure she ever adequately explained the Tom Arnold thing, but we understand some things defy words.