It’s funny that the great Chuck Lorre was born Chaim Levine, because he does keep things in a tribe.
Lorre has a stable of actors who work as regular or recurring characters in one of his (usually long-running) sitcoms, and then are brought in as guest stars in his next blockbuster. His current HBO hit, Stuart Fails to Save the Universe, is the ultimate version of this, with the secondary characters of The Big Bang Theory starring in Stuart, and the major characters, the regular cast of Big Bang (actors like Kaley Cuoco or Mayim Bialik) appearing as guest-starring characters in individual episodes of Stuart. (Stuart is a spinoff of Bang, as was the show Young Sheldon, which now has its own spinoff, Georgie and Mandy’s First Marriage.)
But Lorre—who’s had a long career that spans from an attempt to be a singer-songwriter, to a writer-director of children’s TV (in the 1980s), before turning to adult sitcoms—has always supplied guest roles to actors who starred in his other shows. Jon Cryer, who co-starred on Two and a Half Men (2003-2015) with Charlie Sheen and then Ashton Kutcher, guest stars as a diner in the restaurant where Ana Farris is a waitress in the pilot episode of Mom (2013-2021). Jamie Pressly played the rich divorcee in Ana Farris’s Alcoholics Anonymous group of friends in Mom, and now appears as Leanne Morgan’s hometown Knoxville hairstylist in one of Lorre’s other current shows, Leanne (2025-2026). And there are many such cases (Mimi Kennedy, J.D. Walsh), including a few actors like Tyne Daly, who pops up in single episodes of different Lorre shows.
Leanne is the third Lorre show starring a blue-collar or smaller-town white woman. After working as a writer for two years on Roseanne, Lorre created and wrote Grace Under Fire (1993-1998) with comedian Brett Butler, a blonde, Southern-accented comic much like Leanne Morgan. Butler played a recovering alcoholic single mom of three kids; Leanne’s only divorced (season 1) and going back and forth about whether to marry an FBI agent (Tim Daly) in season 2. Alcoholism, drug addiction and divorce are regular veins Lorre mines for comedy, the substance abuse part of his life starting in his teens and 20s (and continuing perhaps into his 30s and 40s) and divorce something he does every decade or so. Kristen Johnston, another blonde comedian, who played an ex-con who joined the group of friends in the Mom AA group, plays Leanne’s perpetually single sister.
It’d be incorrect to say that Lorre—whose hometown of Plainview, New York is currently less than one percent African-American (though around 25 percent Asian)—doesn’t write material for black actors. He created The Bookie (2023-2025), with a multi-racial cast involved in sports betting, Bob Hearts Abishola (2019-2024) where a white man falls in love with his Nigerian nurse, and Mike and Molly (2010-2016) which co-starred Reno Wilson.
But Lorre’s most popular, longest-running shows have virtually all-white casts, and are set in locales where you might find Jews or Asians, but not many African-Americans. Leanne is set in Appalachia, the part of the South that traditionally is home to poor white people like the young Dolly Parton, Knoxville and its surrounds too hilly to have ever had cotton fields and plantations like Memphis or other areas of Tennessee. And the list continues: Mom—Napa Valley, Two and a Half Men—Malibu, The Big Bang Theory—Caltech Physics Department, Pasadena, Young Sheldon—the fictional Medford, TX, Grace Under Fire—fictional Victory, Missouri, Dharma & Greg—San Francisco.
Leanne is funny enough, without being very cerebral, that it would find an audience regardless of where it was set or who was cast. But I imagine a lot of the American audience is tired of the disproportionate number of plots revolving around “racism,” interracial marriages, biracial children, and constant re-casting of traditional roles with actors of a different race or gender. These audiences—of any race—may identify more with Leanne’s problems of dating after divorce, caring for aging parents, and navigating how to help twentysomething children who’ve left the nest for marriages and families of their own. For them, these Lorre sitcoms are an oasis, which explains why so many of them run for over a decade.
