As Chuck Lorre‘s memoir continues to make the rounds, Tom Arnold is the latest sitcom actor to respond to criticisms of himself in the book.
Following Lorre’s claim in Sitcom that writers on Roseanne (1988-’97) were told to “put Tom’s name on the front page [of scripts]—as if Tom had written them,” Arnold emphasized that he “never would put my name on a script” that he didn’t write, recounting from his perspective “how it went on the show.”
“Roseanne and I sat around talking about what we wanted to do in the next season, or maybe some ideas we had that’d be fun episodes, or groundbreaking, or whatever our bullsh*t was, and I’d write them down,” explained Arnold to Entertainment Weekly. “We kind of doodled around. And then, you know, in probably June, the head writer and the writers would come back and the show starts shooting in August.”
Arnold noted that after breaking the story with the writers’ room, no matter whose name was on the script, it had “every writer’s fingerprints on it.”
“They all work on everything,” he explained. “Even the guys that are brought in to be the punch-up guys, the joke guys, everybody in the room at some point is pitching different things.”
Roseanne and Tom Arnold on ‘Roseanne’
Serving as a producer on Seasons 3-6, during which he had a recurring guest spot as Arnie Thomas, Arnold recalled he “didn’t realize Chuck was having such a hard time, because it seemed to go pretty well. There’s nothing outstanding.”
“I know one thing I said to Chuck early on… I said, ‘You’re in charge of the writers, but they have to have their name on a script every year. Each one of these guys,’” he noted. “Because you get more money, you just get more. I want everybody to have their name on a script. We’ll write extra scripts, whatever we gotta do.”
Arnold continued, “One friend that I really made a point, a guy named Joel Madison, who I just talked to, I don’t think Chuck liked him because he did not give him a script. It was two weeks before we were done, and I found out. I go, ‘Hey, Chuck, you’ve gotta give Joel a script. I told you you had to do that.’ He said, ‘Oh, shoot. Yeah, well, all I’ve got is this one with my name on it.’ I go, ‘Put Joel’s name on it. You’re the head writer, you make a lot of money, put his name.’”
Lorre, who was a writer and producer on Roseanne in Seasons 3 and 4, claimed in his memoir that writer Danny Jacobson once “showed me a sloppy, hand-scribbled couple of pages and explained this was a ‘script’ by the show’s new executive producer, Tom Arnold. It had been part of Danny’s job to write real scripts and put Tom’s name on the front page—as if Tom had written them.”
The 10x Emmy nominee alleged that “several other staff writers would be ordered to do this on many occasions,” which Jacobson confirmed to EW, claiming that Arnold’s then wife Roseanne “bullied me into letting him write a script, which as Chuck described, was exactly right. So it was really — it was a bad energy on the show.”
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