(courtesy Leanne Morgan Comedy Instagram)
Moving on with your life after a traumatic event is always going to be a challenge, and not simply in the immediate aftermath.
In season 1 of the Chuck Lorre sitcom, Leanne, we see the eponymous protagonist of this gentle comedy, played by stand-up comedian Leanne Morgan, grappling with the sudden end of her marriage after 33 years of what, if she is not honest with herself, were ever declining romantic returns.
Her now ex, Bill (Ryan Stiles), an RV emporium owner times three, has been doing the dirty with his dentist, has got her pregnant and is moving on with his much-younger new partner.
Broadsided in rather spectacular and sitcom-ready fashion, Leanne, a Southern woman from Knoxville Tennessee, isn’t sure what to do with her life now all the old certainties, however fossilised, are stripped away, and much of the first season shows her humourously flailing in a world where’s single, of a certain age and uncertain where to go and what to do next.
It’s a ripe-old premise for comedy, and to be fair, enjoyable though it is, Leanne doesn’t really do anything truly innovative with it’s set-up, having a gently comedic field day with trashing the ex, who’s still around a lot to the annoyance of Leanne and her younger, sassier and twice-divorced sister Carol (Kristen Johnston) who moves in temporarily, to offer comfort, company and support and who never really leaves.
Rounding out the cast are Leanne’s parents, cantankerous dad Daddy John (Blake Clark) and her daffy but smart, proper Southern Bible-loving mother Mama Margaret (Celia Weston), who become a much bigger part of the post-divorced picture when they move into Leanne’s home in season 2, and her kids Tyler (Graham Rogers) and Josie (Hannah Pilkes) who are dialled right down for the second season.
The core cast of five are back for season 2, with the addition of judgey neighbour Mary (Jayma Mays) who is, at heart, not as nasty as she initially comes across, in which Leanne goes deeper in what life is like for a single woman redefining her life perilously close to the big SIX-O.
Now, to be fair from the sort-of get-go – I appreciate we’re well into the review so the get-go has pretty much get up and gone – Leanne is not any kind of cutting-edge comedy.
Rather than the meta-embracing topicality and hilariously offbeat edginess of shows like Loot and Survival of the Thickest, with their arch observances of modern life, Leanne is a return to older style comedies which rely on fairly straightforward characters, though they all exhibit some sorts of quirks, reasonably unadventurous 20-minute storylines and reasonably neat and tidy endings.
Lovely though it is, Leanne is not about to redefine sitcoms as we know and love them.
But what it does do rather nicely, and this was evident in Mom too, another Lorre second-tier sitcom, is allow us to spend time with idiosyncratic, mostly grounded people who are somewhat imprisoned by societal expectations and their own ideas of what their lives should be, and who are trying to figure how much they should, or want to, push the envelope.
Making merry with a lot of Southern truisms but also affectionately respectful of them too, Leanne is a sort of quiet revolutionary, much of its charming seditiousness, and let’s face it, it’s very lo-fi and just edgy enough to raise the stakes a little, flowing from the character of Carol, a one time gallery owner and saleswoman in Chicago, who dares to do and say the sort of things much more traditional Leanne would never say.
And yet, things she is feeling as she tries to work out if she’s ready for new love with hunky FBI agent Andrew (Tim Daly), if she wants cosmetic surgery to face her sixties with a whole new look, and what life looks like when her ageing parents move in and require a lot more care than she was counting on.
It’s a lot of big life transitions and Leanne has its fun with them, not so much going deep and thoughtfully assessing things as using a range of issues common to those pincered between their adult kids and older parents, for amusing comedic effect.
Leanne is the sort of show you watch because you like these people, you love their comedically enhanced peculiarities and you’re happy to drift along with them for ten episodes (not the 16 of season 1) as they try to work out life very much like a somewhat normal person would do.
Of course, being a sitcom, normal is a hugely relative state of being, but the characters are accessible and grounded enough that, if you are a person of similar age and outlook, or even frankly if you’re not, you will find a lot with which to identify and joy.
That enjoyment is not really of the raucously laugh out loud kind but that’s okay; Leanne knows that many sitcoms sit happily in the gently humourous camp where you’re not much laughing as smiling with wry recognition about people who become family in their own weird ways.
The idea of a TV show’s characters feeling like family is hardly new and to be honest, half the reason we stick with many sitcoms is because the people in them are fun to be around and we like the escapist fizz of watching them stuff up, work things out and try to fashion something approaching a meaningful life from the resulting chaos and mess.
Possessed of sharp wit and perfect Southern drawl-laced comic delivery, Leanne Morgan gives her show way more comedic buzz than it might otherwise have, her lines coming alive with just the right amount of “am I really this old and alone?” vulnerability and pain while she also refuses to let her ex’s decisions and her parents’ amusingly exasperating actions define her life.
Helping things with a gutsy vivacity and take no prisoners seditious vibe is Johnston who is an able foil to Leanne’s more conservative soul, and together they deliver comedy that while it may not rock your world, makes it feel a damn sight more welcoming and funny than it might otherwise be.
Leanne streams on Netflix.