Whitney Cummings Nearly Prevented Sabrina Carpenter from Becoming A Pop Superstar

Roseanne Barr claims that getting kicked off of Roseanne was the worst thing that ever happened to her. For Sabrina Carpenter, getting cast on it could have been even worse.

Even without Barr, the revival of the beloved 1990s sitcom Roseanne has been a huge success for ABC since The Conners first premiered in 2018. After Barr’s dismissal following her racist tweets directed at Obama administration official Valerie Jarrett, the reworked sitcom sans title character was the #1 new comedy for the 2018 season, and, though The Conners suffered the same gradual drop-off that most sitcoms see in later seasons, ABC is reportedly eyeing 2025 for the release of the seventh and final season of the now-John-Goodman-led comedy. 

This means that, in some alternative universe, Sabrina Carpenter is currently getting ready to send off her Conners character Harris Conner-Healy with grace, and Emma Kenney released the song of the 2024 summer with “Espresso.” 

Comedian Whitney Cummings, who briefly served as the showrunner for the Roseanne revival that became The Conners, recently revealed that Carpenter auditioned for the show before her meteoric rise in the music business. “Thank God we said no to her,” Cummings told PEOPLE of Carpenter’s audition, "because she’d be stuck on a sitcom set and not being Sabrina Carpenter.”

“This business is mostly rejection,” Cummings reflected of her 20-year-and-counting career in show business, saying that, to succeed, she had to get “super comfortable with rejection.” After all, sometimes rejection is a blessing in disguise, as was the case with the Two Broke Girls creator’s biggest close call in the casting room.

Cummings explained of her time casting Roseanne, “Sabrina Carpenter auditioned ... and it wasn’t the right fit. She got a rejection that day when we were casting the daughter.” The role in question, Harris Conner-Healy, is the eldest child of Darlene Conner and David Healy, and when Roseanne became The Conners, Shameless actress Kenney became a series regular, a position that she’s held to this day. 

“I think that we’re still trained in our society to want to win and get a yes,” Cummings said of Carpenter's career arc, "Sometimes a yes is the worst thing you can get, because then you’re stuck on the wrong show for seven years. You’re in the wrong thing.”

By that logic, Carpenter was in quite a few “wrong things” before eventually focusing all her time and talent on music. Carpenter had numerous roles on comedy TV shows throughout her early career, and, from 2014 to 2017, she starred on another 1990s sitcom revival with much worse ratings than The Conners, a short-lived Disney series called Girl Meets World. The Boy Meets World sequel was critically accepted despite its comparatively tame commercial performance, and Carpenter getting her foot in the door with Disney allowed her to release her first few pop singles under the Disney Music-owned label Hollywood Records.

However, ABC doesn’t have quite the music branch of Disney, so Carpenter spending the better part of a decade on The Conners would have been a big step back in her career, and her recent breakout into superstardom probably wouldn’t happen if she were saddled with a seven-season contract on network TV. 

Cummings’ story of Carpenter dodging the Conners bullet makes us wonder which other sitcom actors narrowly missed out on their own stadium tours and top-ten singles — maybe Charlie Day would be better off if he was a real-life Dayman instead of an illiterate janitor.