Roseanne Barr may have been the star of one of America's most popular sitcoms, but she was not exactly a calming presence behind the scenes. According to an oral history of "Roseanne" in Entertainment Weekly, the already-tumultuous set became even more volatile with the arrival of Tom Arnold, Barr's new husband, who was brought in as executive producer on the show. According to Barr, Arnold "became extremely abusive to people. It was my fault for bringing him there."
Barr and Arnold stirred up tension with the show's writing staff by constantly rewriting scripts. "The writers had a fear of me and her," Arnold admitted. Among those writers were Joss Whedon and Amy Sherman-Palladino, who went on to create "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and "Gilmore Girls," respectively. Whedon recalled the "Roseanne" set as a "brutal environment," while Sherman-Palladino remembered the writers each being given numbered shirts to wear, so they could be referred to by their numbers and not their names. "I was number 2," she said. "The writers did not think it was funny."
Barr, however, insisted the numbers were to "strip [writers] of their huge, colossal self-entitlement ... I think they learned something from it."
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