Stream It Or Skip It?
Remember when every hot stand-up comedian got a sitcom? Those were heady days, but the best of those series always leaned into the standup personas of the comedians at their centers. Leanne Morgan is one of those “overnight successes” that has been doing comedy for decades, to the point where she wrote a book about her life in 2024 and Chuck Lorre approached her to co-create and star in a sitcom.
LEANNE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
Opening Shot: Two women are in a kitchen, one with a perplexed look on her face.
The Gist: Leanne (Leanne Morgan) has just found out that Bill (Ryan Stiles), her husband of 33 years, is leaving her for another woman. She just can’t believe it and tells her younger sister Carol (Kristen Johnston), “I’m just so confused. You marry, you have precious babies, those babies have babies, you keep a house running the best you can… You wear tiny, hateful panties that go up your crack and split you in two, because you love him, you do!”
Despite the shocking bad news, Carol is a little happy that for once, she’s there to support her stable older sister instead of the other way around, which is what Leanne has done with Carol through a few divorces and rehab stints.
The news is still pretty fresh, but it seems that Leanne’s son, Tyler (Graham Rogers), knows about it. Tyler’s younger sister, Josie (Hannah Pilkes), who seems to take more after Carol than her parents, doesn’t know yet; neither does Leanne and Carol’s parents, Margaret (Celia Weston) and John (Blake Clark).
Despite the pain she’s in, Leanne and Carol still man the post-service dessert table at church, where Josie wanders in wearing inappropriate clothes and Leanne’s nosy neighbor Mary (Jayma Mays) telling Leanne she’d rave “runaway thoughts” about her husband if he traveled as much as Bill did.
After church, Leanne tells Josie, who now considers herself a “child of divorce”, even though she’s and adult and this just happened. That night, Carol encourages her sister to get back out there, despite Leanne’s reluctance to do so.
When Bill comes back to grab some things, Leanne first punches him in the shoulder, then wants to hash out why he left. When he says he’ll still be around for “all the important stuff,” she tearfully says, “I thought I was the important stuff.”
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Created by Leanne Morgan, Chuck Lorre and Susan McMartin, Leanne has the feel of Mom, another serio-comedic Lorre sitcom that not coincidentally had Johnston in its cast.
Our Take: The path Chuck Lorre’s sitcoms take is pretty predictable: They start off broad, with silly jokes until Lorre’s trusted writing staff find the funny in the show’s characters and write from that. The only differences are how long that actually takes. Shows like Mike & Molly and Bob Hearts Abishola took almost an entire season to find that footing. The Big Bang Theory really didn’t come into its own until Mayim Bialik and Melissa Rauch came on board in the show’s fourth season. In the case of Leanne, the character-based laughs start coming as soon as the second episode.
Despite being commissioned by Netflix, Leanne is a traditional network multi-camera sitcom. There are 16 episodes, all coming in at 19 minutes, as if there were commercials. Despite the TV-14 rating, there seems to be little in the way of dialogue that couldn’t be on CBS at 9:30 at night. It’s not a show that’s trying to remake the form, which is likely what Morgan wanted when she signed on to do it.
Even though Morgan is still married, and the trials and tribulations of marriage dominate her very funny standup specials, it’s interesting to watch her navigate the life of being someone who is approaching being single in her late ’50s after being blindsided by the end of her marriage. She tones down the nasally twang of her standup voice at times, especially when things get serious, and does a fine job of swinging between comedic hijinks and real emotion.
It helps that she’s got a wingperson in Johnston, who can just make us laugh via her extremely expressive face. The two of them together show their chemistry from the first seconds of the first episode, and subsequent episodes set them up as a mature version of Laverne and Shirley, or a single version of Lucy and Ethel. It’s certainly the same dynamic that drove Mom, with Anna Faris and Allison Janney’s chemistry driving the comedy until Lorre and company could settle on a formula that worked best for the show (which included the addition of Johnston).
So, even though Leanne gets off to a rough start, we’re pretty confident that, given the subject matter and the cast that Lorre has assembled around Morgan, the show will be doing a good job balancing the funny and the serious aspects of Leanne getting her life back together before this first season is over.
Sex and Skin: None.
Parting Shot: Leanne asks Carol to sleep next to her after Bill comes over to get some stuff. Not sure why he didn’t take his CPAP machine, but it makes for a good gag when Leanne asks Carol to put on Bill’s CPAP mask so she can be reassured by the breathing.
Sleeper Star: Celia Watson and Blake Clark have been in so many shows that you know they’ll do a solid job no matter who they play, and they’re funny here as Carol and Leanne’s parents, who are going through what all seniors go through but remain undaunted.
Most Pilot-y Line: Leanne tells Tyler that he needs to change his toddler son’s name from Bill Jr. to Rex because she doesn’t want to hear Bill’s name anymore. “Oh, he won’t know the difference… look at him!”
Our Call: STREAM IT. Like most Chuck Lorre sitcoms, Leanne needs to find its way for awhile, and there are moments during the first handful of episodes that feel as cliched and “sitcommy” as it gets. But the cast starts clicking pretty quickly, especially Morgan and Johnston, and that goes a long way to upping number of genuine laughs each episode has.
Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.
Credit to Nypost AND Peoples
