Comedian Leanne Morgan’s self-titled sitcom has dropped on Netflix as of July 31, 2025, telling the fictionalized story of when her husband has an affair with a younger woman. It’s the sort of structure we saw on the sitcom Reba about 20 years ago, but this time, divorce is an empowering thing. Finding the humor in life and those around her, Leanne is determined to rebuild her life from the ground up.
Frankly, I’m already sold on the new series Leanne, despite only having this much information to go on. A female lead over the age of 50, real-life drama without the sensationalism and genuinely brilliant jokes is more than enough on its own, but there’s layers to the new Netflix comedy. Morgan has been in the comedy game for over 25 years, but there’s a good chance many subscribers have never even heard of her. She oozes charm and – in her own words – “dazzle” (you might have seen her on the most recent episode of Amy Poehler’s Good Hang podcast), and her Southern drawl is an absolute wonder… she could say anything in the phone book and you’d be hooked on it.
Clearly Morgan’s time in the global spotlight is long overdue, but I’m just as interested in her series co-creator. That’s none other than Chuck Lorre, part of the brains behind the growing Sheldon-verse that includes The Big Bang Theory (TBBT), Young Sheldon and Georgie and Mandy’s First Marriage. He’s also now got Stuart Fails to Save the Universe on the go, but before that gets legs, fans of the franchise need to see Leanne for one very, very good reason.
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Where something like Georgie & Mandy’s First Marriage hasn’t quite landed how to adapt the traditional sitcom format for a 2025 audience (think the sound stage, laugh track vibe Young Sheldon left behind in 2017), Leanne has made it into its own. Why have Morgan and Lorre found it so easy? Because you simply can’t help but fall in love with Leanne herself, even if the humor isn’t always doing it for you.
Broadly speaking, the structure of sticking a laugh track over multi-cam filmed comedy scenes just doesn’t work anymore, even if it did for TBBT back in 2007. It’s just not how we connect to what makes us laugh anymore, and there’s a reason why most new hit comedy shows have pivoted to single-cam strategies instead. Leanne takes a risk by keeping it classic, but it naturally lends itself to the Southern charm and sheer amount of bombastic chaos we more regularly saw in pre-2000 comedies. Kristen Johnson’s Carol is a fantastic example of this – her comedic aura is just too big to restrict to a single camera point of view.
If nothing else, Leanne hammers home the message we need to hear right now. Women are all-powerful and important in every possible aspect of life. If needed, they can move mountains to start from scratch while not losing sight of the joy that’s right in front of them. For me, it’s even better that the show isn’t always perfect, because who wants to be that? As someone who misses Young Sheldon et al. more than I miss George Cooper being alive, Leanne has perfectly scratched that sitcom itch.
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