Mulaney, Mobilized

It’s nice to have John Mulaney back. We didn’t know it at the time, we comedy fans, but there was a scary period when the world almost lost the comedian to addiction before he entered rehab at the end of 2020. Ever since then, he’s been talking about his recovery, life with a new girlfriend (Olivia Munn) and fatherhood, most famously in Baby J, the harrowing Netflix special that chronicled a hilariously ill-received intervention and the experience of getting off drugs.

Since Baby J, the future of John Mulaney, the performer, has been a big question mark. Would he just go back to doing stand-up indefinitely, keep appearing every year as a host of Saturday Night Live and as a porcine character in Spider Verse sequels?

Mulaney admitted last month in an unusual one-shot episode of My Next Guest Needs No Introduction, David Letterman’s Netflix interview show, that he’s not a planner. He doesn’t look too far ahead career-wise. But the surprise launch of a six-episode live talk show on Netflix, Everybody’s In L.A., is the clearest indication yet of where Mulaney is going and where his career might go.

The show coincided with the streamer’s increasingly huge Netflix is a Joke Los Angeles comedy festival, where some of the biggest names in stand-up would already be around and available. So, Mulaney’s live show was able to draw guests including Jerry Seinfeld, Jon Stewart, Nikki Glaser, Gabriel Iglesias, Hannah Gadsby and Letterman himself over its one-week run.

So what was Everybody’s In L.A. like? Very Mulaney. The mix of guest-heavy panels, call-in questions, filmed segments that were either comedy sketches or earnest bios of L.A. businesses and people, seemed loaded with Mulaney’s preoccupations like fringe celebrities (Lou Adler, James Goldstein), babies, and bad parking. The official show topics were like an outsider’s list of Los Angeleno concerns: earthquakes, palm trees, helicopters. Nikki Glaser joked on the show that it was like one big inside joke that only John Mulaney would get. That’s a great line, but not entirely accurate: Mulaney still has a sharp comedic sensibility and he can still make obscure topics, like old true-crime stories in Los Angeles, funny and interesting for audiences who weren’t yet even alive for the O.J. Bronco chase.

Mulaney as the ringleader of a sprawling live television show, with the reliably daffy and wonderful Richard Kind as his co-host, looked healthy and focused. After reviews came in of the first episode or two, which had pacing problems and weird Dad of a 2-Year-Old Needs To Get Out of the House energy, the comedian used one of his monologues to insist that he was sincerely trying to do a good job, not creating an intentionally awkward show for laughs.

Some of it was hilarious. Mulaney as always is a great talker and some of the conversations he had with panelists, particularly on the fifth episode, crackled. That was the one Mulaney insisted would be their Emmy episode and which found Letterman cuddling under a blanket with Luenell, an elderly Instagram personality who brought chaotic energy to an already teetering endeavor.

Other parks clanked, hard. A pretaped sketch mocking fans of Tina Fey and Amy Poehler was an absolute disaster. A reunion with Oh, Hello! co-star Nick Kroll revising their Broadway show characters was funny, but not as funny as fans might have expected. Some of the slice-of-live video segments killed the live show’s momentum and weren’t much better than what you’d see as human-interest segments on local TV news (minus the Netflix production budget). A running gag about a delivery robot named Wayso went on for far too long and ended up concluding the whole series.

The most surprising thing is that Everybody’s In L.A. had the most in common with one of Mulaney’s least-appreciated projects, his Netflix special John Mulaney & the Sack Lunch Bunch. That, too, was a variety show trying to mine new comedy out of an old TV format. If Sack Lunch tried to reinvent public television kids TV from the 70s and 80s, Everybody’s In L.A. was definitely mimicking the laid-back, deep-conversation vibes of, say, Dick Cavett.

But Mulaney is far from laid back; he always seemed eager to jump to the next bit or to cut bait immediately on a phone call or a scripted bit that wasn’t working or was trying his patience. He asked every caller to the show what they drive, not because it elicited funny answers, but because Mulaney was anthropologically curious about how Angelenos get around. No other comedian would have kept doing that question over and over until it finally worked three or four episodes into the run. Such is Mulaney’s confidence in his craft.

Mulaney told Letterman on the latter’s interview show that Sack Lunch was the project he’s most proud of and that tracks with what Everybody’s In L.A. was trying to do: kicking the tires of the tired talk show/variety format to see if there’s still life in that old thing. Mulaney seemed a little worn out  by the last  of the six episodes: it may not be something sustainable as a regular light-night show given the amount of guests and material each 60-minute show, with no commercials, burned through. But if Mulaney decided to drop a half dozen episodes of this show every year, it wouldn’t be the worst thing for hardcore fans of his comedy, or anyone else willing to go along for an unpredictable ride.