Leanne’s New Netflix Special ‘Unspeakable Things’ Provides Southern Comfort with a Sneakily Sharp Undercurrent

As someone who grew up in the armpit panhandle of Florida, I find myself comforted by the tinny lilt of Leanne Morgan’s voice. She radiates the warm, familiar energy of a Southern mother. Someone who’s nurturing, honest and just a tad judgmental. 

That conceals deeper themes running beneath her funny stories about life and motherhood. There’s a much more raw narrative present about a woman coming into her prime after spending the bulk of her life in service to the nuclear family.

That’s not too far from the character she plays on her self-titled Netflix sitcom Leanne, but in real life, she’s no divorcee. Instead, the title of her second Netflix special Unspeakable Things references her sex life with husband Chuck Morgan. 

It’s the joke that serves as a through-line for the entire set, from when she’s describing her current life as a successful comic who’s starring in movies with Reese Witherspoon and touring Southern California to the very first trip she took after she had her babies when she was a young mother. It sure doesn’t skip the period in her marriage when sex was part of the negotiation to get out the door and head to church. 

It’s a series of jokes that could have inspired several very-serious think pieces in 2017 with titles like “Obligatory Sex Is Never Funny” and “You Never Owe Your Husband Sex.” But it’s pretty clear we’re past the #MeToo era and into something let’s just describe as “something else.”

Louis CK’s biggest sin now is selling out Madison Square Garden three times and Woody Allen is on podcasts not even we know. So, Morgan’s repeated jokes about doing “unspeakable things” for her high libido husband in the interest of making her life easier feel well-timed. 

She speaks often of being a grandparent and wanting to spitefully spoil those babies despite input from her children begging her not to. She wants to lose weight, especially now that she’s working on movie sets with teeny, tiny women like Reese Witherspoon, but she can’t because it turns out craft services offer hot meals every few hours.

She is, like her first special suggests, every woman,well, maybe not every single one. But there’s no denying Leanne Morgain is representative of a generation who were wild and funny and smart but societal and cultural norms funneled them into lives as wives and mothers whose chief concerns were thinness, soccer practice, and getting to church on time. 

If you’ve ever met a southern woman who can command the kitchen as a gathering wraps up, Leanne Morgan’s special will feel familiar; for people who have never met a brash southern woman as audacious as she is traditional, she might feel like a novelty. But after about 45 minutes of the show, the comfort from hearing Morgan’s voice started to morph into a realization that her new special was also a way for her to contend with a life blooming past her husband and children’s needs—after spending multiple decades of it being the other way around. 

There were a few moments where she’d recall a moment from her marriage where she painted her husband as affably clueless. “He’s smart at work. Not at home,” she realized after marrying him. While the audience belted out laughter, it was tough not to wonder if she was telling these jokes as a full-blown coping mechanism. 

One anecdote, where she had to be hospitalized for her pregnancy, caused me not to chuckle but instead to groan. When her husband arrived at the hospital, charged with caring for their other children while she received medical attention, their young son had a full diaper hanging “down to his ankles.”

The life she describes recalls the reality of Kevin Can F**ck Himself starring Schitt’s Creek’s Annie Murphy. There the world is divided into two universes: there’s the sitcom world, where the husband is a hapless everyman and the wife is the adoring and ever-tolerant side-kick. Then, there’s the real world, where that hapless everyman is actually draining the life and will to live out of his wife. 

And as Leanne Morgan recalled her life as a wife and mother in Unspeakable Things, it felt a bit like a crossover event.