Leanne Morgan on Going From Stand-Up to Her New Netflix Sitcom

Chuck Lorre first encountered stand-up comedian Leanne Morgan via her 2023 Netflix special “I’m Every Woman,” which became a smash for the platform. Morgan was a 50-something mother — and now grandmother — from Tennessee, and her routine resonated with the “Two and a Half Men” and “The Big Bang Theory” comedy titan.

“It’s really simple: I saw her stand-up and I went, ‘Oh my God. This is an original voice,’” says Lorre — who famously got his start writing sitcoms for the likes of Roseanne Barr and Brett Butler. “It’s authentically who she is. Her manager said, ‘Would you like to meet her? She could come visit you.’ I went, ‘You know what? I think I should go to Knoxville.’ So I went to Tennessee to spend time with her family, and they’re just wonderful people.”

That visit eventually led to the creation of her upcoming Netflix sitcom “Leanne” (from Warner Bros. TV), which premieres July 31. Morgan says she has had plenty of development deals that went nowhere, including one with Matt Williams (who created “Roseanne”) and another with Sony TV. But this felt different.

“When Chuck Lorre flew to Knoxville and sat on my back porch and held my grandbaby and asked me if I would do a television show with him, the whole thing was crazy,” she says. “My husband sits and watches ‘Big Bang Theory’ every night, all night long. Honey, that’s all he does. That’s his show… I really felt validated after 25 years of doing stand-up and getting a lot of nos, a lot of ‘You’re not edgy enough,’ ‘You’re too plain.’”

Netflix quickly caught wind of Lorre’s visit. “I got a call from somebody at Netflix who said, ‘We understand you’re talking to Leanne Morgan. If you do something there, would you call us?’” Lorre remembers. “Since her stand-up’s on Netflix, they must have some dark, deep mathematics about it.”

Indeed, the streamer has been busy building out its “Netflix Is a Joke” business, and now is creating sitcoms around some of those stars.

“On the stand-up side, we work with best-in-class comedians from all over that reach very different audiences,” says Netflix comedy head Tracey Pakosta, who has found success with Shane Gillis’ “Tires” and Wanda Sykes’ “The Upshaws,” and just gave a greenlight to Bert Kreischer’s sitcom “Free Bert.” “And as we all know from back in the day when these types of shows were more popular and resonated, when you find somebody that has a very specific authentic voice, it makes sense to lean in. And Leanne is absolutely one of those talents.”

It’s also a throwback to the 1990s comedy frenzy — when talent like Barr, Jerry Seinfeld, Tim Allen, Drew Carey, Martin Lawrence and Ray Romano all hit it big by moving from the stage to the set.

“That was my goal,” Morgan says. “Being my age, coming up in stand-up and loving television, that was my dream.”

Netflix was bullish enough on the show (and Lorre’s involvement) to give it an unprecedented 16-episode order. In “Leanne,” which is set in Knoxville, Morgan plays a woman whose life is upended when her husband (Ryan Stiles) suddenly leaves her for another.

Morgan is happily married, so that part of the story isn’t autobiographical — but having kicked her career into high gear in her 50s, she can absolutely relate to her character’s big life changes. That includes learning how to star in her own TV show.

“The first three weeks, I got those scripts, and I was in every scene, and I never learned a script like that,” she says. “I didn’t know what camera blocking was. I didn’t even know about lots like to go in and film at Warner Bros. in Burbank, everything was new to me. I was overwhelmed. I’ll be 60 in October, and I don’t think my life is over, but things are a little hard for me at my age. I thought, ‘there’s no way I’m going to learn all this’ and there was a big learning curve. And then I kind of settled into it, once I got over the shock and the being overwhelmed.”

Morgan said she got a little bit of advice from one of her comedy heroes: Jerry Seinfeld, who has become a fan, reached out to offer some words of encouragement: “He said, ‘I’m telling you, Leanne, you’re going to walk on that set, and it’s going to feel like home.’ And by the end of it, that’s what it felt like to me. He was right.”

It also helped that Morgan’s daughter, who is her makeup artist, joined her on the journey to L.A. And her co-stars include sitcom vet Kristen Johnston (“3rd Rock from the Sun”): “She was like my teacher and my best friend, and then the writers, Susan McMartin and Nick Bakay, were so loving. They all wanted to see me win.”

Says Lorre: “We threw her into the deep end too. She has some really dramatic scenes to play in these first few episodes. She wasn’t being asked to just simply hit a mark and tell a joke. She had to go from zero to 100 and become an actor very quickly. And she did.”