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

The first episode of this comedy, about a woman who has to rebuild her life after her husband leaves, is bad – really bad. But it gets better, in a brain-melting sort of way …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. Continue reading...

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