recently renewed<\/a>) Chuck Lorre sitcom called Leanne. She is no longer just Leanne Morgan; she is Leanne Morgan Gone Hollywood. She is still an emissary from a foreign land, but instead of Target and fishing trips, her land is now shaped by hotel rooms and craft services. But it\u2019s all happened very quickly, and as a result, Unspeakable Things is an incomplete, underdeveloped look at whoever Morgan is now becoming: someone famous.<\/p>\nMorgan\u2019s great gift as a comedian is in drawing vivid imagery. Unspeakable Things opens with a recap of her life over the last few years, beginning with the painful act of watching her own first special. She tells the crowd it changed her life, but she\u2019s only been able to watch it once, because it bothers her so much to look at her own body and wonder, \u201cWhen did my breasts get so fat?\u201d Not cute fat, she rushes to clarify. They\u2019re not attractive breasts. They\u2019re \u201cbig ol\u2019 mamaw breasts.\u201d This is how Morgan positions herself throughout the special\u2019s opening sections: She may now find herself hanging out with Will Ferrell and the hair-and-makeup crew of a straight-to-streaming rom-com, but they are celebrities, and she is the one with big ol\u2019 mamaw breasts. She is the one still grounded, still trapped by all the rules of human bodies and moral standards that keep people from losing themselves to fame, and unlike everyone else in Hollywood, she\u2019s got enough of a foot back in the real world that she can still see how wild this world really is. She has a strong sense of this happening bodily \u2014 she is so much bigger than her co-star, she says while holding up a bottle of water to demonstrate Witherspoon\u2019s size compared with hers. She figured she\u2019d lose so much weight while shooting their movie out of sheer nerves alone, but unlike everyone else on set, she\u2019s not accustomed to the ubiquity of a craft-service meal, so of course she ate every hot meal offered to her. She wore sandals with an ankle strap for many of her scenes, she says, and by the time she got to the end of the shoot, \u201cthose darling wardrobe people had to poke an extra hole in my strap.\u201d<\/p>\n
The less clich\u00e9 and more personal version of this idea \u2014 Morgan, the real human suddenly transported into a Hollywood fantasyland \u2014 arrives later, when she describes going on an outing with the film\u2019s hair-and-makeup department to a historic hotel, which was in fact Atlanta\u2019s Clermont Lounge. \u201cThat,\u201d she says, pausing and lowering her voice for emphasis, \u201cis a strip club.\u201d One of her eyes closes slightly, turning her into a cartoon of shock and dismay. \u201cWhen I found that out, I said, \u2018Oh I\u2019m sorry. I have the Holy Spirit.\u2019\u201d The crowd woos, but the look on Morgan\u2019s face is not fire-and-brimstone fury; it\u2019s blank confusion. Why should she be in there? What is this world she\u2019s now inhabiting? \u201cDo you think if I go to this thing, I\u2019m going to feel the presence of Satan?\u201d she asks her daughter. \u201c\u2018Yeah, girl. I do.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
Morgan\u2019s smart enough to twist the story, veering away from an Evangelical lesson about righteousness and toward a more terrestrial concern. By the end of her time at the Clermont Lounge, her worry is not about the presence of Satan or women being taken advantage of, but a 30-something dancer who looks like Ms. Frizzle from The Magic School Bus who danced in a patriotic red, white, and blue bra and pantie. \u201cAnd I\u2019ll just tell y\u2019all,\u201d Morgan says, \u201cit was a little dingy. And as a mother, all I could think of when that little thing was dancing was, Man, I wish I could take that bra and pantie set home and Biz that overnight.\u201d It is a fantastic metaphor for Morgan\u2019s overall comedic approach. It allows for entertainment to be a little revealing, and it\u2019s good to talk about the hidden, unmentionable things in life. It can be about sex and body parts and underwear (Morgan, after all, loves a big pantie); she loves to think about parts of life that are generally covered by polite society. But please, while we\u2019re stripping down to reveal naked parts of ourselves, let\u2019s at least make sure that those panties are clean. Let\u2019s return often to the preciousness of grandbabies, and how hard Morgan\u2019s husband has worked to support their family, and, yes, that she has the Holy Spirit.<\/p>\n
If all of Unspeakable Things was built around that premise, or at least willing to then go deeper into Morgan\u2019s ambivalence about Hollywood culture, it would be a stronger hour. She has an impressive handle on a tricky idea; even though she now arguably belongs on those film sets just as much as Witherspoon, she doesn\u2019t feel like she\u2019s misrepresenting how much she still feels like an outsider. Nor do her religious beliefs or cleanliness standards come off as scold-y or judgmental. She knows she\u2019s the one out of place here, sitting in a strip club and fantasizing about dunking underwear into a bowl of soapy water. She\u2019s enjoying how far it feels from her previous life, even if she also feels distinctly out of step.<\/p>\n
But after the first 20 minutes of Morgan grappling with her current life, Unspeakable Things pivots backward into a family album of Morgan\u2019s past. These stories about stuffing kids into snowsuits and her husband\u2019s perpetual lateness are still charming, but there\u2019s a different valence to them after the opening context of craft services and the Clermont Lounge. They are dispatches from a version of Morgan\u2019s life that no longer exists. As she shuffles through them over the rest of the hour, it becomes clear that the jokes about spoiling her grandchildren lack the tension of Morgan trying to reconcile her persona with her current reality, or the self-aware twinkle of longing for a den of iniquity better suited to her own preferred grandma aesthetic. But Morgan has not reconciled that contradiction within her own new persona. Is she willing to embrace the Hollywood mess, or is she still holding herself apart?<\/p>\n
Her closing joke is about her husband, who she always refers to by his full name. Chuck Morgan spent years being egregiously late for church, and Morgan recalls the struggle of getting all their kids ready to leave the house without any help. \u201cEventually, Chuck Morgan would get up, pop his boxers, cough up something,\u201d Morgan says, \u201cand start staring at me.\u201d But the undercurrent of that joke is how Morgan has to negotiate for power. She\u2019s trying to please her husband while wrangling her kids, and she\u2019s not able to set the agenda or make anything happen the way she wants. All she can do is say, \u201cOkay.\u201d Morgan tells that story with fondness, looking back on a simpler time when her own desires were secondary to what everyone else in her family wanted. It\u2019s a discordant note to end a special that begins with Morgan wrestling with her new cultural power.\u00a0She\u2019s left with the choice of getting to church on time or having a closet quickie with her husband so that everyone has a nice Sunday, and of course she has no real option but the latter. \u201cBut I\u2019m only taking one leg out of these pantyhose!\u201d she tells him. It\u2019s the Leanne Morgan recipe again, built on pleasant contradictions: sex but wholesome, hidden in a closet but on the way to church.<\/p>\n
That material feels nostalgic, and while Morgan is more than capable of peppering her jokes with her usual linguistic trademarks and selling them with style, they feel safe and baggy, endearing but soft. Short jabs about how little financial power Morgan once had over how to spend her time now end with an implicit ellipsis she cannot figure out how to turn into a punch line. Now she doesn\u2019t have to pack herself a lunch unless she really wants to. What\u2019s left unclear is whether Morgan has accepted the embrace of craft services, and whether that means her days of Jell-O salad are over.<\/p>\n
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