Leanne review – you can't help but love the star of this terribly written, joke-free sitcom

The Guardian

7 days ago

Leanne Morgan came to standup relatively late. Born and raised in rural Tennessee, she got married at 26 to her college sweetheart and raised three children while the couple built a jewellery business together. It was the door-to-door selling she did and the Tupperware parties she hosted for extra income that first got her a local reputation for being funny and then led to bookings at comedy gigs. But it wasn't until 2018, when she hired a social media relations team to promote clips of her act online and they went viral, that her comedy career took off and real fame beckoned. Two years ago, when she was 57, Netflix first broadcast her hour-long standup show I'm Every Woman, which she was performing on a 100-city tour. It shows the audience eating out of her hand as she takes them down the highways and byways of marital and menopausal life. Now she is the lead in a new Chuck Lorre-produced sitcom Leanne.
It is best to be upfront about these things and say that the opening episode is bad. Worse than you've just assumed when I said 'bad.' Gone is the lightness of touch, the consummate ease, the subtly immaculate timing of her stage show; instead, we have a leaden script punctuated by a desperate laughter track, and a one-note performance by Morgan as 'Leanne', a menopausal woman closing in on 60, whose husband, Bill (Ryan Stiles), has just run off with a younger woman after 33 years of what his wife had thought was a perfectly happy marriage.
Rounding out what is shaping up to be a 16-episode car crash between derivative sit and vanishingly little com are a set of stock family members. There is son Tyler (Graham Rogers), adored by his mother, henpecked by his wife; deadbeat daughter Josie (Hannah Pilkes), forever drunk/high and/or wondering whether she's pregnant, and ageing parents Daddy John (Blake Clark), ornery and tough, and Mama Margaret (Celia Weston), sweet and frail. Then there's twice-divorced, pill-popping sister Carol, played by the usually glorious Kristen Johnston, who here spends 22 minutes reduced to constant gurning in the absence of any actual jokes to deliver. When a perky neighbour at church tells her 'I'm basking in the sunshine of our saviour!', Johnston distends her face to its not-inconsiderable maximum as she replies: 'Working on a melanoma, good.' Well, you've got to do something. God, who'd be an actor?
There are a few stabs at pathos – Bill says he will still be around 'for the important stuff', Leanne replies 'I thought I was the important stuff' – more lines where the intended comedic effect is revealed only by the laughter track, and then it is, mercifully, over.
If you can get past this initial horror, however, things get better. Partly, I think, genuinely and quantifiably. The actors find a rhythm, the strain on everyone involved becomes less apparent and the jokes become recognisable as jokes. Not good jokes, not ones I would quote here, confident that they could survive the transition to print, but keep in mind that at one point in the first episode the exchange 'You can't keep a secret', 'Watch me!' was scored as such, so we are working within the narrowest margins here.
And once your expectations are suitably lowered, it takes on a charm of its own. The colours are bright. The multi-camera format reminds you of happier, simpler times from your youth. Morgan and Johnston are in almost every scene and have comedy chops that can overcome even the most defiantly second- and third-tier writing and reward your viewing investment with glimmers of merriment. It starts to take on a rosy hue. Are you entertained, or just glad that the first 22 minutes are safely past and need never be seen again?
Who's to say? Whatever is happening, it's … sort of nice. Will Carol drag her sister out on a disastrous date night before she's ready? Why, yes, yes she will. Leanne ruins the vibe by showing the guy pictures of her beloved grandson ('Named after his granddaddy, who may rot in hell!'). Did you see the second half of that line coming? Of course you did. But now it's kind of comforting instead of eye-rollingly inadequate when it arrives, no? Let's just try one more episode and see if it gets a little better after this one, too. I think it does! Or is my brain melting? And does it matter? I feel happy. I am happy.
All of which is to say – I've no idea what star rating to give this thing. One? Or five? Perhaps I should average it out to three, even though it feels overall like a two? But Leanne – or 'Leanne' – is doing her best! And she's so good in her special! And I'm so glad she's out there, flying the flag for older women! And I love her accent. That may be what is casting most of the spell, now that I think about it. So be it. Two stars for the show, one for the honeyed drawl. There you go.
Leanne is on Netflix