“A single mom who works two jobs, who loves her kids and—” you know the rest.
That’s the theme song to Reba McEntire’s iconic early aughts sitcom Reba, but it could also double as the intro to Netflix’s new comedy Leanne, debuting July 31. Like McEntire’s series, Leanne takes a known Southern star (in this case, comedian Leanne Morgan) and sticks her into a story about betrayal, divorce, and starting over. Only where Reba felt like a breath of fresh comedic air, Leanne is mostly just stale.
Or, charitably, you could call it a comedy for a specific audience—Boomers and older Gen Xers looking for the easy, formulaic rhythms of Two and a Half Men and The Big Bang Theory. Like those shows, this one also hails from co-creator Chuck Lorre, who, to his credit, has delivered more creative sitcom premises in projects like Mom and Bob Hearts Abishola. But Leanne is the most basic, straight-down-the-middle half-hour series imaginable. The kind that wrings live-studio-audience laughs from jokes about Spanx being tight and CPAP machines being loud.
That’s the bread and butter of its star and co-creator, who burst onto the scene with her 2023 Netflix comedy special, Leanne Morgan: I’m Every Woman. Morgan honed her comedic voice as a door-to-door jewelry saleswoman in Tennessee, where she connected with her clients by joking about motherhood and marriage. Her YouTube page is filled with stand-up clips with titles like “When dieting makes you CRAZY,” “What to do when your daughter’s outfit is skanky,” and “What happened to normal jeans?!”
It’s an innocuous, occasionally charming style of observational Appalachian comedy that carries over to the show. Morgan stars as Leanne, a mother of two adult kids who’s been happily married to her college sweetheart Bill (Ryan Stiles) for 33 years. That is until she learns he’s leaving her for another woman.
Suddenly Leanne’s pitch perfect Southern housewife life crumbles faster than her confidence. Her put-together son Tyler (Graham Rogers) and wild child daughter Josie (Hannah Pilkes) feel pressured to take sides, while her passive aggressive church lady neighbor Mary (Jayma Mays) practically beams over the gossip.
Since Morgan is clearly still new to the world of TV and finding her feet as an actor (her deadpan stage presence doesn’t quite translate to a fictional setting), the show largely pairs her with comedy veterans who can pick up the slack.
3rd Rock from the Sun’s Kristen Johnston plays Carol, Leanne’s fiercely loyal no-nonsense sister who moves in to help her get through the divorce. Character actor Celia Weston is her aging but still tough-as-nails Mama Margaret. And Georgia standup Blake Clark plays her old school Daddy John—the kind of Good Ole Boy who imagines the woman he saw at the airport must have just been dressed like a pilot. (The charismatic Clark manages to make the intentionally obnoxious character work better than it has any right to.)
The veterans usually score at least one genuine laugh per episode, like when Mays condescendingly advises, “Now is the time for lasagna. Ozempic comes later.” Or Johnston nails an eye roll. But a handful of chuckles do not a sitcom make.
While the best half-hour comedies sparkle because their characters are lived-in and specific, Leanne just goes for broad archetypes that seldom feel like actual people—which is even more glaring when the show aims for unearned pathos around Leanne and Bill’s fractured relationship. (Despite Stiles’ iconic time on Whose Line Is It Anyway? and The Drew Carey Show, he’s stuck playing a weirdly mopey character here.)
It doesn’t help that the overall tone is more hacky than hilarious. While Morgan’s stand-up is built around self-deprecation, it works because of her confident delivery of her embarrassing stories. The show, however, makes its heroine anxious and insecure in a way that’s less funny or original when it comes to stories about aging modern womanhood and dating in your 50s. (She might’ve been more fun as the sassy sister than the lead.)
And while Leanne’s self-effacing jokes about her body are fine, if a little retro, there’s a stroke of something meaner in her relationship with her daughter-in-law Nora (Annie Gonzalez)—who’s depicted as a judgmental interloper trying to pull Leanne’s son away from her. It’s a style of humor only self-described “boy moms” will sympathize with, which, to be fair, is probably the audience Leanne is chasing.
Though Leanne occasionally hits the level of “blandly pleasant” across the eight episodes screened for critics (the first season consists of 16 episodes total), it neither adds something new to the sitcom canon nor elevates an old formula. The best it can do is give Netflix something to autoplay after your next Reba binge ends.
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