The Jackie Thomas Show is an American sitcom that aired on the ABC network from December 1992 to March 1993. The series received widespread attention due to its creators Roseanne Arnold, then starring in the fifth season of her comedy Roseanne, and her then-husband and Roseanne co-producer Tom Arnold. The Jackie Thomas Show starred Tom Arnold as a misanthropic sitcom actor.

As Jackie Thomas, Arnold played a former nightclub comic and slaughterhouse worker now starring in his own sitcom (a show-within-a-show), also called "The Jackie Thomas Show." As described in one review, Arnold's character was "an obnoxious, loud-mouthed tyrant who fires writers, producers, actors, even the show's caterers, on the slightest whim." In the premiere episode (written by the Arnolds with Brad Isaacs), Jackie demanded that the child actor portraying his sitcom son be killed off, due to Jackie's jealousy over the amount of fan mail received by the boy.

"He's unbelievable," Tom Arnold said of the Jackie Thomas character. "It's a guy you love to hate. He has his own reality and it's different from the people around him. And you go, 'Gosh, the guy is such a jerk.' But you have compassion for him, especially as the show goes on, because you learn where he came from, what's really going on with him." The character was named in tribute to Arnold's two favorite comedians, Jackie Gleason and Danny Thomas.

From the beginning, The Jackie Thomas Show was intended to be an ensemble production, as Arnold "didn't feel [he] was ready" to support a show on his own. The cast included recurring Roseanne guest star Martin Mull as a network executive, Dennis Boutsikaris, Michael Boatman, Paul Feig and Maryedith Burrell as writers and Alison La Placa as an office assistant.

The show was designed partly as an homage to The Dick Van Dyke Show, which centered around a fictional television variety show with a tyrannical star. (A photo of Dick Van Dyke was displayed prominently on a character's desk in the first Jackie Thomas episode.) Roseanne Arnold said that she had always "wanted to do a TV show that talks about television."

Critics drew many comparisons between the premise of The Jackie Thomas Show and Roseanne and Tom Arnold's real lives. Like Jackie Thomas, Tom Arnold had worked at a meatpacking plant and as a nightclub comic before realizing fame and fortune in the sitcom world. The Arnolds were also notorious for quarreling with Roseanne's writing staff and firing writers on a whim, much like the fictional Thomas. The couple acknowledged the similarities; Tom Arnold was quoted, "We wanted to take the show-business end of our lives and mix the public perception of us and the reality of us and put them into the show--the images of what people think maybe we did or what they've read that we did."

Roseanne said, "All the work we do is personal. It's based on my kids, my family. You just take it from real life. That's the funniest stuff."

Such comparisons were bolstered by a BBC documentary, Feeding the Monster, which depicted the backstage activity behind the writing, rehearsal and filming of the season four Roseanne episode "Santa Claus." Although the documentary didn't mention The Jackie Thomas Show, the Los Angeles Times' Jeff Kaye said that "the documentary unveils a real-life, parallel universe to the new series." Kaye wrote that "the show's writers live in constant terror, their exhausting work-weeks punctuated by Pepto-Bismol swigging and all-night writing sessions. They are emotionally battered and their life expectancy on the show is short." The segment aired in Britain but was omitted from the documentary's American broadcast on the Showtime cable channel, due to Roseanne Arnold's relationship with Showtime's rival HBO.