Chuck Lorre’s newest sitcom introduces standup comedian Leanne Morgan as a middle-aged, church-going Tennessee woman whose life is turned upside down when her husband of 33 years leaves her. Leanne is a protagonist not often seen on TV, finally satisfying the hunger that Morgan has seen from women her age while on tour.
“I knew that I was in a lane by myself, and that my demographic had been ignored, and Hollywood has ignored them … I see all the time, when I’m on stage, how hungry they are for something that depicts their life and something authentic,” Morgan told TheWrap, thanking Lorre on behalf of women and their husbands in the middle of the U.S. for crafting one of the only shows centered on on the group.
“It is a vacuum — those stories are not being told about their lives, and I just saw that as an opportunity to take on something that isn’t being beat to death,” Lorre said, adding that “young love” has been “pretty much covered” on TV in a wink to his CBS series “Georgie & Mandy’s First Marriage.” “This is really fresh territory, I think, comedically.”
Lorre added that each time he seeks out his next project, he challenges himself to find what’s missing on TV. “There’s a whole world of human beings that are being ignored … their difficulties and the comedy that comes from it,” Lorre said. “It comes from when a family turns upside down, how to get it right side up again, maybe never get it right side up again. But those are stories worth telling.”
Lorre first became acquainted with Morgan through her standup, which he said swept him away. “It’s like nothing I’d ever seen or heard and it was singularly truthful and honest and one of a kind — no one else is doing anything like what Leanne does on stage,” he said.
The veteran TV creator was specifically drawn to one part of Morgan’s standup, in which she discussed her friend who was pushing 60 and going through a divorce and still made it humorous. “That’s what I like to do — I like to take comedy out of the nightmare,” Lorre said. “That’s what the show really is: The nightmare of a long, long, apparently wonderful marriage crashing and burning.”
Lorre approached Morgan with the idea for the show — and for her to star in it — by flying out to Knoxville, Tenn., where he sat on Morgan’s back porch and held her grandchild while delivering the news.
“I felt validated and really it moved me, because … this hasn’t been all for nothing,” Morgan said of her 20+ years performing standup. “Here’s Chuck Lorre wanting to do a show with me. It’s been a dream come true.”
While Morgan has made the stage her home doing standup, “Leanne” is one of her first times delving into the world of acting, with her previous credits including “You’re Cordially Invited” and “Sun Moon.”
“I didn’t know anything; I didn’t know what the terminology was. I didn’t know there was going to be this big soundstage, the 250 in a crew, all of that, but they all wanted to see me win and everybody helped me,” Morgan said. “At first I was overwhelmed and thought, ‘Am I worthy of this? Can I do this?’ But after every episode, I would feel a little more settled in, and then it felt like home.”
Lorre applauded Morgan for learning on the spot, especially for the more emotional moments at the start of the series that require Morgan to “basically have a breakdown on camera” as her character learns that her husband is leaving her for another woman. But naturally, there was no learning curve when it came to the comedy, with Lorre saying the timing is “in [Morgan’s] bones.”
“There’s 20 years of work that went into developing that standup act and that’s something you can’t fake,” Lorre said. “That experience is hard won, and it takes time. It takes failure. It requires you to rebound from failure and learn, and you either [learn] or you just get bitter and hard and miserable. It’s a choice.”
If anything, there was more of a learning curve for the show’s more dramatic moments, though Morgan noted the devastation her character felt came naturally to her as she imagined if she was in a similar position, instead of being happily married to her longtime husband, Chuck Morgan.
“We wrote it and rewrote it, trying to find the truth of it,” Lorre said, noting the difficulty of starting a brand new show from scratch. “The very first scene is a woman traumatized … it happened yesterday that she found out that he’s leaving and that’s that’s an extraordinary thing to have to do right out of the gate, and do in front of a live studio audience as well.”
Both Lorre and Morgan are all in on continuing “Leanne” with a potential Season 2 should they get the green light from Netflix. Lorre noted “Netflix has been extraordinarily supportive” of the show, which is in line with his past experiences at the streamer where he created “The Kominsky Method” and “Disjointed.”
“The ethos of Netflix is if they’re going to greenlight a show and say, ‘Go make the show,’ they let you go make the show, which is not my experience in network television,” Lorre said.
With all 16 episodes of “Leanne” shooting at once — as opposed to shooting one by one across August through April on a network timeline — Lorre noted the autonomy can be “treacherous” at times.
“You can be wrong, you can make mistakes, you can go down. You can misunderstand one of your characters and their relationships, and you have to learn very quickly what’s what’s in front of you, and how best to tell their stories,” Lorre said. “It’s a little unnerving, but I think we’ve managed pretty good.”
“Leanne” is now streaming on Netflix.
