Chaos Reigns on Everybody’s Live with John Mulaney

Zoom in on the dash clock. Hit the Wang Chung. Cue up the ‘80s-looking footage of a sprawling, sunburned Los Angeles. John Mulaney’s Netflix talk show is back on Wednesday nights for a 12-week run, and it’s largely unchanged from last year’s six-day experiment—for better and worse.

If you missed John Mulaney Presents: Everybody’s in LA last year, you missed a fascinating show that didn’t just embrace its shagginess and rough edges but made them the whole damn point. Mulaney would welcome a weird collection of guests—a celebrity, a couple of comedians, an expert on some aspect of LA culture, a musical guest—and forgo the typical talk show one-on-ones in favor of a rambling group conversation (very loosely) themed around a specific nightly topic related to the expert’s field of choice. It was disjointed and frequently awkward but that made it seem realer than talk shows usually get, and Mulaney’s relish for catching guests off-guard and courting live TV disaster was infectious. 

Last night’s premiere of Everybody’s Live with John Mulaney, as the new show is called, picked up right where last year’s show left off—albeit, as Mulaney joked at the beginning, with enough time in-between for him to have forgotten absolutely everything he learned making the first show. Celebrated actor Richard Kind is back as announcer and sidekick, a smiling robot named Saymo delivers drinks and snacks to the guests, and the whole set looks like a rich Californian’s living room from the late ‘60s—all encouraging the kind of convivial vibe you expect from a hang-out chat show. 

Everybody’s Live’s spark comes from the tension between that warm, welcoming atmosphere and the barely-constrained chaos of its production. Guests don’t always gel, the celebrities don’t always have anything interesting to say about the night’s topic, the expert tries to relay facts while the famous people around them barely pay attention, comedians try to get their jokes in, and Mulaney intentionally keeps everybody off-balance, routinely jumping from guest to guest with unexpected questions, abruptly cutting to pretaped segments, or patching in live callers who nominally have something to say on the topic. (The live calls would be the first thing dropped from the show if it had any other host and aired on any other network.) In last night’s monologue Mulaney joked that a show like this is the only way to get his heart rate up now that he’s famously clean and sober, and he takes palpable delight in a format that bucks the tightly regimented structure usually enforced by the TV industry. 

The problem with all this chaos, though, is that it’s not always entertaining or interesting. Last night’s premiere probably would’ve been the worst episode of Everybody’s in LA. You can’t expect the show to stick exclusively with Los Angeles-specific themes now that it’s a regular, weekly program, but last night’s topic—“lending people money”—didn’t prompt any captivating stories from the guests, who included Michael Keaton, Joan Baez, Fred Armisen, and personal finance expert Jessica Roy. Roy was a polished, confident TV presence, but Keaton seemed to be part of a different conversation. Baez easily made the biggest impression of the guests, starting with a political statement against the “incompetent billionaires” ruining America, and then sharing a couple of memorable stories about Martin Luther King Jr.’s sense of humor and about how she almost immediately drove a Tesla she once owned into a tree. Mulaney seemed to default to the live callers a little more than he did during the show’s first run, which made everything feel even less steady; perhaps he could tell these guests and this topic weren’t fully gelling, or maybe he just really loves asking the people of America what kind of car they drive. 

The best parts of last night’s debut weren’t the show’s main conversation or Mulaney’s shaggy monologue, but the notes that happened in-between. Two short pretapes asking food service employees in what appeared to be a Louisiana crawdad shack and an urban pizza joint about lending money and weird customer requests had a John Wilson-style everyday weirdness to them. And a taped segment with Mulaney interviewing a panel of actors who had played Willy Loman in different productions of Death of a Salesman—some famous, like Anthony Lapaglia, Christopher Lloyd, and Rob Morrow, but mostly unfamiliar—about how Willy would respond to various topics (including Mortal Kombat) had a very Mulaney touch to it—a silly take on a “smart” subject, with absurdity rooted in a faded style of mid-century Americana. 

Richard Kind, of course, remains tremendous. He’s up for anything, an eager-to-place golden retriever of a co-host who pops up in absurd comedy bits that riff on his persona as a well-tenured actor and also play with the expectations of a button-downed TV announcer, like a more good-natured, more recognizable version of Alan Kalter’s role on The Late Show with David Letterman. He also frequently joins in on the conversation, sharing anecdotes from his long acting career or his personal life; in last night’s episode, he was actually the chat’s MVP, making the night’s most worthwhile contribution when he explained his own history with lending money to friends. 

Beyond the pre-taped segments, the true highlight of the first episode of Everybody’s Live was its musical performance. Cypress Hill has been performing with orchestras since last summer, and last night did a version of “Hits to the Bong” with a string section that sounded surprisingly great. It might sound gimmicky to have the preeminent weed rappers of the 1990s team up with a damn symphony, but it absolutely worked.

Everybody’s Live didn’t have the best start last night, but that’s not that surprising. It was kind of behind the eight ball from the start, without the element of surprise that Everybody’s in LA enjoyed or the rhythm that Mulaney and crew were able to establish over that show’s six consecutive nights. Despite how little was changed from the format or presentation, it really was like starting over again for them. The chaos will almost definitely become better managed in the weeks to come. The broader themes might be an issue, though; the LA focus was an important part of the first series’ identity, and oriented the conversations around topics that most guests could speak about. Not everybody has a good story about lending money, but anybody living in the Los Angeles area has something to say about earthquakes or helicopters. Still, Mulaney’s high strung, uniquely prickly charm, Kind’s commitment, and the sharp writing (from a team that includes such great minds as Jess Dweck, Langston Kerman, Jeremy Levick, Rajat Suresh, and more) made the debut of Everybody’s Live an enjoyable hour.

Senior editor Garrett Martin writes about videogames, TV, travel, theme parks, wrestling, music, and more. You can also find him on Blue Sky.