Leanne Morgan and the Women Over 60 Reviving the Multicam Sitcom

The Comeback That Defied the Odds

It used to be that if you were a successful stand-up comedian, you got your own sitcom. Look at the 1990s and it was happening constantly—Seinfeld, Ellen, Everybody Loves Raymond. The multicam format was where a comic with a point of view landed, and audiences followed the voice they already knew from a special or a club set.

Then the format fell out of favor. Comedy went single-camera, the studio audience started to feel like a relic, and the pipeline that turned road comics into network stars narrowed to almost nothing.

Well, that pipeline is open again. The people who pried it open are women in their sixties.

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The second season of Leanne Morgan's Leanne just premiered on Netflix, and Morgan is as surprised as anybody that it worked.

From Stand-Up to Sitcom

Created by Susan McMartin, Chuck Lorre, and Morgan, the series casts Morgan as Leanne, a newly single woman rebuilding her life after her longtime husband leaves her for another woman. Her sister Carol, played by Emmy-winner Kristen Johnston, moves back to their hometown, and the two now-single sisters start over together.

For Morgan, who spent 27 years in stand-up before any of this happened, the multicam is not a throwback. It is the thing she grew up wanting.

"Oh, honey, it's thrilling, thrilling," she told Newsweek. "I grew up loving WKRP in Cincinnati. I mean, I could name a thousand: Frasier, Seinfeld. I mean Ray Romano [Everybody Loves Raymond], Roseanne, all of them. So that was my dream."

Netflix framed the show as a mission from the start. Morgan pitched it alongside Lorre, whose multicam record is more or less the modern history of the form (Two and a Half Men, The Big Bang Theory, Mom. The list goes on)...

"They said, 'Leanne, we think you can bring back the multicam,'" she said. "And I thought, I don't know if I can carry that burden."

Navigating a New Era

There was a stretch not long before when she was not sure she would get to carry anything at all.

"I had a time in my early fifties where I thought nothing was happening, and I got so down and thought it's not going to happen," Morgan said. "And then my husband encouraged me to keep going."

He was right. Morgan now has a hit sitcom with her name on it and a stand-up tour filling arenas across the country.

Navigating a soundstage did not come naturally. Morgan leaned on Johnston, who has been working in this format since 3rd Rock from the Sun, to translate the parts nobody explains to you.

"The minute we met, we had chemistry," Morgan said. "She knew that I didn't know, and honey I was scared to death. I would say, 'What is that Hollywood word, what are y'all talking about?' Somebody would say something about a camera and she would teach me."

The friendship outran the mentorship fast. Morgan camped out in Johnston's green room while Johnston tried to learn lines. They kept turning up to set in the same jeans. Johnston spent part of the summer with Morgan in East Tennessee.

"She was gracious enough to help me and she's so wonderful that she just taught me how it works," Morgan said. "Isn't that something?"

The New Wave of Multicam

Leanne is not an isolated case. NBC has had real success with Reba McEntire's multicam Happy's Place, enough that the network is building a night around the format and pairing it with the forthcoming Newlyweds, which stars Téa Leoni and Tim Daly and is produced by Jamie Lee Curtis.

Morgan has noticed, mostly because it means Daly is now spoken for on a rival network.

"Tim Daly is my boyfriend," she said, referring to Daly previously appearing on Leanne as her love interest. "They better bring him back, is all I got to say."

Her theory about why all of this is landing now is simpler than any trend piece.

"I think that people just miss it," she said. "I feel like so many people can relate to where I am in my life. Most everybody's got a mama, got a sister in the back of a minivan, got a grandmama."

She is aware she is part of a group—women in their sixties—even if she does not entirely believe it. Leoni? Curtis? Morgan? All women in their sixties (and McMartin and McEntire are just on either side of the decade).

"It's a bunch of us: Jamie Lee Curtis, Téa Leoni. I mean, legends," she said. "But yeah, I don't know why. We must be the new 'It Girls,' I guess."

The It Girl Lifestyle

The It Girl schedule is punishing. Five days at the beach with her grandchildren is the extent of the break on her calendar.

"When I get down and think I'm so tired, I take a lot of vitamin D, K3, magnesium," she said. "You ought to see me at night when I go to bed. I look like a kidnap victim trying to get sleep because I have to prioritize my sleep."

What keeps her upright is the reach of the thing, which shows up in airports more than in ratings decks. A flight attendant will tell her the whole family watches, the 8-year-old and the grandfather both.

It is a long way from where she started, and she knows exactly how she got read when she showed up.

"I know when I first started getting on Netflix, I know they thought, who is that woman? Where did she come from?" she said. "I was out in the middle of the United States doing stand-up, but I was never one of the cool kids."

Success, it turns out, does not have an expiration date. Neither does being the person nobody thought to put on the list.