I don’t know for sure how many primetime late-night shows have started off with a bit about the host watching a suit-wearing man commit multiple acts of violence with a lamp through a telescope, but I’m willing to bet it’s just one: Everybody’s Live with John Mulaney. Mulaney’s latest television project premiered last night on Netflix after something of a trial run last May. (Mulaney referred to this his opening monologue, saying: “We did six episodes, it was called Everybody’s in LA…Netflix did a focus group about the title Everybody’s in LA, and it turns out that people around the country don’t like LA. After the fires, I said, ‘Maybe they would like us more now,’ so we tested it again, and it turns out, no.”)
As a longtime Mulaney fan, I was vaguely concerned that the tony allure of a primetime slot would tempt him toward pat, predictable late-night jokes and sketch formats. As it turned out, however, I needn’t have worried. The show’s first of 12 episodes—loosely organized around the question of whether it’s a good idea to lend people money or not—definitely hit on some current pop-cultural highlights (Luigi Mangione jokes and references to Mulaney’s growing family abounded, and none other than Joan Baez called out the billionaires currently tanking our democracy). But all in all, it was a vintage Mulaney production, one whose strange-to-the-point-of-defiance “I like this so you’re all going to watch a sketch about it” sensibility reminded me of nothing so much as his extremely weird but lovable children’s musical comedy special John Mulaney the Sack Lunch Bunch from 2019.
Getting Baez, Michael Keaton, Fred Armisen, personal finance columnist Jessica Roy, and Mulaney’s longtime friend and collaborator Richard Kind together to take audience calls about the intricacies of loaning out money was a wise move on the show’s part—after all, what late-night show can survive without a deep bench of star power?—but the moments of Everybody’s Live that I loved the most were the smaller, more nonsensical ones, such as the chyron that called Mulaney “Talk Show Host (White)”; a truly bizarre sketch featuring Tracy Morgan as “King Latifah”; and the return of Saymo, Mulaney’s beloved delivery robot from Everybody’s in LA. The whole night felt like nothing so much as an inside joke Mulaney had with himself, and really, who wouldn’t want to be in on that?
Nobody can deny that it’s been a challenging few months for Angelenos, and while even the best of talk-show hosts couldn’t fix our city’s systemic issues alone, there’s something really wonderful about watching Mulaney set such an idiosyncratic and wholly fluff-free series here. After all, New York has gotten more than its share of late-night shine, and we’re way overdue for an LA-based show that’s willing to get weird as hell with it. I mean, Mulaney based an entire segment around various actors who have played the title role of Willy Lohman in Death of a Salesman! Does that make any concrete sense? No. Will I be seated for next week’s episode? Absolutely.
