Grandma Gone Famous

Leanne Morgan's latest hour can't quite reckon with her growing celebrity.

- COMEDY / KATHRYN VANARENDONK

THE COMEDIAN Leanne Morgan speaks to her audience as if she were an emissary from another world, her specials playing out like a travelogue of detailed descriptions from her life laid out with the assurance that these details will be thrilling, exotic. In her first Netflix special, 2023's I'm Every Woman, Morgan was coming from a land of honest pragmatism; she showed off an everyday, down-to-earth sensibility. It's not that Morgan's life is all that unfamiliar—much of her material is about the challenges of marriage, or memories of how hard it is to parent young children, or the frustrations of having an aging body. But comedy has a bounty of middle-aged men humping stools and occasionally noticing that death eventually comes for us all. Being a grandparent is a more common experience than being frightened by trans people, but only one of those is a well-represented perspective on a stand-up stage. Morgan has risen to fame in the past few years partly because of her obvious skill and partly because being a 60-year-old woman from rural America—an otherwise unremarkable identity—makes her a rarity in the world of hourlong Netflix comedy specials.

Her second special, Unspeakable Things, is an attempt to translate that sensibility to where Morgan has found herself since the release of that first hour. She's blown up. She's on Amy Poehler's podcast talking about whom to go fabric shopping with. She played Reese Witherspoon's sister in You're Cordially Invited. She stars in a new Chuck Lorre sitcom called Leanne as a woman very loosely based on herself; after debuting at the end of July, Leanne has already been renewed for a second season. Morgan has gone on a speedrun of comedic celebrity, and after just one very popular special, she is no longer simply Leanne Morgan—she is Leanne Morgan Gone Hollywood. Unspeakable Things is an incomplete, underdeveloped look at who Morgan is now: someone famous.