Something about John Mulaney's Netflix talk show isn't working
I won't disclose how many times I've rewatched a wild TV moment that aired during the third episode of 'John Mulaney Presents: Everybody's in L.A.,' the six-day live talk show John Mulaney hosted for Netflix last May. But it clarified for me why 'Everybody's Live with John Mulaney,' the 12-episode weekly sequel airing now, feels distinct — in good ways and bad — from the show's friendlier and messier first draft.
Mulaney's show was proudly unpredictable from its inception, a retro-punk version of late-night sheared of all the tiresome beaming. In lieu of prebaked segments in which celebrities promote projects, Mulaney gathered people together to riff on a particular theme. The show was (and remains) live and mostly unscripted, save for the monologue, some preplanned bits and a smattering of funny and bizarre taped segments. When it debuted, Mulaney's experiment came across as niche and unpolished but also communal, warmly defying expectations (it doesn't even live up the 'late' part of 'late-night'; it airs at 7 p.m. Pacific time).
It's fun to watch how a brilliant comedian who's a few years into a tricky public pivot handles himself in real time. In his 2023 special 'Baby J,' Mulaney, who cultivated an 'open and vulnerable' stage persona in his earlier stand-up, thematized his effort to break free of the 'likability' jail that public figures deal with by showing audiences his uglier, meaner side.
On 'Everybody's Live,' both stage versions — the pushover and the schemer — are present, but they oscillate more than they integrate. I've thought often of Mulaney's account (to podcast host Theo Von) of how a psychiatrist summed him up when he was 17: 'Half of you is this really nice guy who wants to, you know, do the right thing and be a good person, and the other half of you is a gorilla whose sole purpose in life is to destroy the first half.'
Sometimes, as in the 'Everybody's in L.A.' segment I kept rewinding, that tension produces delightful results.
Both Mulaney's original show and this newer, weekly version tend to feature one 'expert' on the theme of each episode. For the 'Helicopters' installment I'm talking about, Mulaney smuggled in two. The first was Zoey Tur, the helicopter pilot who became the first to broadcast O.J. Simpson's attempt to flee in the white Bronco. Tur and comedians Nate Bargatze and Earthquake were eventually joined on the big, brown leather couch by Marcia Clark, who famously prosecuted Simpson for the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman. Clark's presence — and area of expertise — soon established not only that the episode's secret subtheme was the O.J. Simpson trial, but that Mulaney was seizing his chance to revisit a quintessentially L.A. story from a fresh angle.
The first inkling of how much Mulaney was relishing this encounter between two major players in that case came when he asked, a little too innocently, whether they'd met. They hadn't. 'Oh,' Mulaney said, an impish gleam in his eye, 'so this is the first time.'
Tur greeted Clark by saying, 'I caught your criminal.' 'I really wish you had, you know, but never mind,' Clark replied, grinning. It was a terrific little beat. Both women were perfectly genial. But as seasoned veterans of a particularly vicious version of L.A. media, they were also squaring off.
It's easy to imagine the pleasure with which Mulaney booked these guests.
'Well,' he said, back in decorous host mode. 'It's water under the bridge.'
The juicier exchange came later, when Mulaney asked Clark how she felt about journalists like Tur, and Tur whether she ever got a scoop 'that might have blown a case or an investigation?'
Tur replied with an explosive anecdote about a predawn call she received from a cop at the crime scene. The anecdote directly challenged a narrative Marcia Clark had advanced as prosecutor. The tone was cordial, but the air was charged. Marcia opened her mouth to reply. I leaned forward, eagerly.
Then Mulaney said, 'Nate Bargatze, YOU love candy,' followed by a noise that sounded like 'eurgh.'
It was perfect television. The theme (helicopters) blended perfectly with the obnoxious, seedy L.A.-ness of this chapter in true crime, all of it heightened by the brewing tension between the two women on the couch. The subject was meaty, the context rich. There was lore to unpack. And then Mulaney, playing a well-meaning Goody Two-shoes, deflated the moment he'd instigated and trollishly spoiled the fun.
Even Bargatze was so absorbed in the moment that he fumbled Mulaney's invitation to redirect. 'Yeah,' he replied before objecting: 'I was listening to this whole thing!' 'I know, but we're trying to cover a lot of different topics. I thought it was a good pivot,' Mulaney said.
The exchange stuck with me, in hindsight, because it practically overflowed with two elements I've found myself missing in the show's newer iteration: shared curiosity and genuine tension.
It also demonstrates how nimbly (and frequently!) Mulaney flips between the conflict-avoidant, vaguely transatlantic host persona and the savagely observant, gossipy, judgmental chaos agent. It's like witnessing a tennis match where one guy plays both parts. There's Wily, Acerbic, Kind of Mean John (heretofore known as WAKOM), who gleefully set up the awkward first meeting. Nice Host John sails in to dispel the awkwardness. WAKOM asks a question aimed at pitting Clark against Tur. Nice John acts like the answer is an emergency he must defuse rather than a conflict he directly elicited.
It's virtuosic, the perfect way for Mulaney to use his two personas. But in the new season, Mulaney sometimes forgets how to aim the gorilla.
That John Mulaney has long wanted to do a talk show is basically the closer for his 2023 special, 'Baby J,' which chronicles his struggles with addiction and culminates with the comic reading excerpts from an interview he gave while high. 'I always wanted to do a talk show where the guest is always someone from a job that I don't understand,' Mulaney said (to GQ's Frazier Tharpe) shortly before going to rehab.
'What is that like? How do you feel about yourself?' he imagines himself asking a dogcatcher. 'I'm not judging, but I am a little. How do you feel rounding up dogs and taking them to the pound?'
I'd love to watch that show, and 'Everybody's in L.A.' sometimes approached it. Mulaney, who doesn't fake curiosity well, is genuinely fascinated by Tur's work, for example, even if he also asks pointed questions about its ethically dubious side. It's fun to watch him explore L.A.'s coyotes and palm trees with folks and experts who (mostly) seem game to play along, and it's fun in a different way when they resist. Mulaney's musical numbers for 'Saturday Night Live' about New York, such as 'Diner Lobster' and 'La Guardia,' prove how good he is at skewering cities he loves. With L.A. as his new canvas, Mulaney built a show stuffed with deep cuts (comedically speaking) that was also (mostly) convivial and collaborative. It capitalized on his gift for inviting others into whatever game he's playing — here, the project of defining the city's whole deal.
When the show returned as 'Everybody's Live,' Mulaney claimed they dropped the Los Angeles part of the show because it tested poorly. But the failure to swap something else in might have been a mistake. Excluding the city as an umbrella category has by default left Mulaney (and his interests) as the show's focal point. And he's trickier for guests to rally around than L.A., for all the reasons I enumerated above.
Mulaney's flexible identity has become part of his charm. As he said in his 2018 special, 'Kid Gorgeous': 'Fourteen years ago, I smoked cocaine the night before my college graduation. Now I'm afraid to get a flu shot. People change.' (In 'Baby J,' he revealed that he, in fact, routinely got unnecessary flu shots from a shady doctor who supplied him with drugs.) Part of the fun of that Clark-Tur segment was the delight Mulaney took in the encounter and in the multiple identities he got to occupy while arranging (and later, neutralizing) a conflict.
That sense of mischief has been lacking in the talk show segments. Not even Mulaney can muster much interest in some of the subjects he chose, or in the experts discussing them. Some (like cruises) feel phoned-in. And his obvious anxiety over whether an exchange will pay off sometimes trumps his interest in any particular contribution; he frequently truncates conversations that were just getting going.
It doesn't help that there's so much amiable agreement between Mulaney and his guests. Absent some fiddly onstage dynamic he can provoke and stage-manage, WAKOM Mulaney — who needs something to do, especially when things are too friendly — turns all that surplus energy (and vitriol) on the poor callers.
There's a sense, then, that where 'Everybody's in LA' joyfully invited folks in, 'Everybody's Live' kicks them out. The eccentricity that makes Mulaney's stand-up so good is precisely what makes it hard for many guests and callers to chime in. His dinosaur bit, for instance, is so genuinely weird that no guest managed to really join him in that headspace. Conan O'Brien tried hard. So did Tina Fey (before she reverted to uncomfortably defending science). When an actual world-class expert (paleontologist Jack Horner) called in and tried to play along, Mulaney — who seemed not to know who he was — hung up on him.
Some guests, like Molly Shannon and Robby Hoffman, come to the show prepared, armed with research and ready to play on their own terms. But most default toward mirroring Mulaney's energy as best they can — which often means more joking about the callers, which creates a feedback loop that tilts the balance toward Wily, Acerbic, Kind of Mean John.
Acerbic John can be fun. It's instructive to watch Mulaney's snap judgments in action, as when he hung up on a caller in the 'Cruises' episode because his anecdote sounded too rehearsed: 'You've added little tags, it's become a yarn and we don't have time,' he said. But his gorilla side needs more absorbing work. (Maybe the key is inviting two experts instead of one and setting them up to disagree?) As it stands, the speed with which Mulaney flips from one persona to another, which so impressed me in that delicious Clark-Tur segment, has started to seem more arbitrary than skillful. Half the suspense in 'Everybody's Live' is whether a caller is going to get Nice Host John or WAKOM John.
At present, WAKOM is winning. That's fine, I guess, but it feels a little too easy. I wish he'd go back to using those powers on the city. Or his guests.
Everybody's Live with John Mulaney airs Wednesdays on Netflix.
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