Everybody's Live with John Mulaney felt aimless in its debut episode - Sitcoms Online Message Boards

TMC · 03-14-2025, 11:56 PM

https://www.npr.org/2025/03/13/nx-s1...h-john-mulaney

"There were lots of moments when it seemed like Mulaney was trying hard to deconstruct all the tropes we have come to expect from traditional talk shows – from the chummy announcer/sidekick to calls from viewers, just like the phone-ins venerated CNN host Larry King featured," says Eric Deggans of Mulaney's new weekly Netflix variety series. "But the offhand, randomly eccentric vibe distilled in Mulaney's debut Wednesday didn't feel so much like a bold reinvention of talk shows as an uncomfortable middle ground between parody and mimicry. And instead of lending an air of danger or anything-can-happen excitement, the show's live element just added an overarching pressure which seemed to stifle the proceedings rather than elevate them. A lot of the show's vibe was first revealed in Netflix's six-night experiment last year, John Mulaney Presents: Everybody's in L.A.: the roomy set with ornate doors for guests, announcer/onstage foil Richard Kind, appearances by the autonomous delivery drone Saymo and the spot-on choice of theme music, Wang Chung's 1985 hit To Live and Die in L.A. But while last year's debut was an entertaining jumble of esoteric ideas – kicked off with a masterful monologue on the absurdity of Los Angeles – the first episode of Everybody's Live on Wednesday felt a bit more aimless."
ALSO:

Thankfully, Everybody's Live didn't stray too much from Everybody's in L.A.: "The ‘70s-inspired set on a Hollywood soundstage proved a metaphor for the transition from one-off experiment to a three-month run of a dozen weekly episodes: mostly the same, with minor tweaks only apparent to a small subset of nerdy aficionados," says Alison Herman. "That’s great news for fans like myself, having named Everybody’s in LA one of the best shows of last year in my annual roundup. It’s nonetheless surprising how non-expository Wednesday’s technical debut was. The presence of Saymo the delivery robot, for example, went unexplained. Mulaney’s four-wheeled friend needed no introduction for those who watched the bug-eyed apparatus develop into a full-fledged character last spring, but neophytes dropping in on a major launch from a worldwide streamer may have been left scratching their heads. Mulaney may have cracked that the name change came after focus groups showed audiences didn’t like LA, but nothing else about the show felt focus-grouped or planned with mass appeal in mind."
Everybody's Live's first episode was marred by subpar execution: "The first show was a bit of an awkward mess—not that he seemed too concerned about it," says Chris Murphy. "Wearing a maroon blazer and shirt, Mulaney came out to deliver the monologue while inexplicably holding a clipboard. As the show went on, it became clear that he was crossing things off along the way—suggesting that the clipboard provided some type of road map for the show." Murphy adds: "Though his attitude was decidedly laissez-faire, Mulaney really did seem to be opening up, letting us into his life and his (pretend) home. The show’s warm and comfortable set—modeled after a Los Angeles living room with a grand piano, a telescope, and a view of the city—contained framed photos of Mulaney and his wife, actor Olivia Munn. Rather than going for topical humor in the monologue (though he made one solid Luigi Mangione joke), he veered toward the personal....Thankfully, opening up about his personal life didn’t stop Mulaney from doing what he does best: telling jokes, and edgy ones at that."
Everybody's Live picks up where Everybody's in L.A. left off: "Everybody’s Live’s spark comes from the tension between that warm, welcoming atmosphere and the barely-constrained chaos of its production," says Garrett Martin. "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."
Whatever Everybody's Live sacrificed in looking a skosh more coherently produced, it gained in looking more comfortable with its quirks: "It didn’t look like it was straining to re-invent the format; it mostly looked like a rearrangement of the atoms," says Bill Carter. "A little Letterman here, a little Conan there, a notable strain of SNL, mixed with Donahue taking live calls and Suze Orman telling you how to spend your money. The genre familiarity worked to ease a viewer through the slightly bent, consistently appealing style. Mulaney possesses every element needed for a strong late-night host: charm, charisma, playfulness. Most importantly, he can be counted on to be funny."
Everybody's Live is eerily similar to Everybody's in L.A.: "Everybody’s Live With John Mulaney is an odd duck of an interview show that could either redefine the way viewers consume late night television or just another of Netflix’s iffy experiments to bring live content to subscribers," says Matthew Creith. "Mulaney leans heavily on his relationships with former Saturday Night Live colleagues like (Fred) Armisen and Tracy Morgan, the latter appearing on tonight’s episode as a fictional African leader named King Latifah. Like Graham Norton, Mulaney delights in bringing on a mixture of guests to regale his audience with humorous stories from their past, but the other segments simply don’t land as much as the host wishes they would. Much like Everybody’s in L.A., the whacky approach that Everybody’s Live With John Mulaney takes is an acquired taste that ignores its studio audience by relishing in its own absurdity."
It's okay that John Mulaney dialed down the weirdness of Everybody's in L.A.: "Having a loose housing for Mulaney’s eccentric ideas served Everybody’s in L.A. quite well, and losing the city as a centerpiece for Everybody’s Live suggested the new series could be broadening out," says Ben Travers. "After all, this isn’t a limited week-long run anymore. This is a 12-episode order. A full season. A new series. And with an extremely popular comedian at the helm, Netflix executives undoubtedly see an opportunity to attract a wide audience — one more shot at reinventing the late-night talk show for the streaming age, a la Chelsea, The Break with Michele Wolf, Patriot Act with Hasan Minhaj, and others. So if dialing back the weird a little means dialing up the viewership (and keeping Mulaney around, season after season), why not give it a go?"
John Mulaney brought back his entire Everybody's in L.A. writing staff and added two more writers for Everybody's Live
Joan Baez derailed Everybody's Live's first show by attacking President Trump

TMC · 04-11-2025, 08:21 PM

Everybody's Live with John Mulaney delivers its most accessible episode yet

"Make no mistake: Everybody’s Live with John Mulaney is still offbeat and often delightfully befuddling," says Dennis Perkins. "But over the last two weeks, whether intentionally or not, it seems to have hit a certain stride that one imagines would make it a bit more scrutable to the average Netflix viewer. It doesn’t hurt that Mulaney’s guest list for Episode 5 included a trio of recognizable faces in Bill Hader, Chelsea Peretti, and Jackass‘ Johnny Knoxville (who Mulaney states in all sincerity should be next in line for a Kennedy Center honor for his contributions to American comedy). And if the series’ conceit of tossing out an extremely loose organizing theme for the episode (this week it was 'getting fired') is as seemingly unrelated to the guests as ever, at least Mulaney finally explains of Everybody’s Live‘s topics, 'It’s just whatever I want.'" ALSO: David Letterman to return to John Mulaney’s couch next week.

TMC · 04-17-2025, 06:02 PM

David Letterman’s visit to John Mulaney's Everybody's Live was a "meeting of two masters of showbiz irony"

"Almost exactly a decade after Letterman said goodbye to his reign as all-time iconic talk show host, seeing the carelessly bearded Dave bantering with the natty Mulaney on this week’s Everybody’s Live is to watch past and present confront each other with different shades of ironic laughter, says Dennis Perkins of Letterman's second visit to Mulaney's couch after appearing on Everybody's in L.A. last year. “Letterman, in his long and storied career, was a consummate put-on artist in the guise of a traditional talk show ringleader. He peppered interviews with visiting movie stars with a glinting detachment from the usual chat show scripted banter and canned anecdotes. Dave was always Dave, his midwestern skepticism uncowed by tradition and glamor, yet reveling in the comic possibilities afforded by his unlikely position. John Mulaney, weaned as he was on Letterman’s style as generations of comics have been, presides over his own version of the late-night show. His is a mutant offshoot of the form that relishes in the largesse of streaming ubiquity while still affording the longtime stand-up and TV writing maestro freedom to indulge his own take-me-or-leave-me vision. Everybody’s Live is a late-night show untroubled by the need to chase ratings or the latest stars—it’s Mulaney, with Netflix cash and a career’s worth of comedy cred, viewing the genre as a toy chest of bits, skits, and people he just wants to hang out with. His show is at once deeply personal and airily offhand." ALSO: John Mulaney explains why being a parent to a toddler is like working on The Ellen DeGeneres Show.

TMC · 04-26-2025, 12:31 AM

John Mulaney roasts Neil deGrasse Tyson on Everybody’s Live: "Don’t make that guy your front-facing dude"

According to Cracked, Mulaney took on the famed astrophysicist on last night’s show, saying: “Do you want to be less vulnerable, science? Get better messengers. The people they push out there like Bill Nye, and that — don’t get me started on that Neil deGrasse Tyson. He was rude to me once on a podcast, so it’s kinda personal. But, then again, everything’s personal. I just, I don’t know.” It's unclear what Tyson did to Mulaney, who appeared on the astrophysicist's StarTalk Live! podcast in 2022.

ALSO:

TMC · 05-01-2025, 07:12 PM

John Mulaney's Everybody's Live roasts Bill Belichick and Jordon Hudson

Richard Kind dressed like Belichick while Everybody's Live writer Fran Gillespie played his girlfriend in a spoof Hudson's viral interruption of Belichick's CBS Sunday Morning interview. ALSO: Everybody's Live reimagines Phish as Seinfeld.

TMC · 05-16-2025, 03:51 AM

Everybody's Live with John Mulaney is missing the shared curiosity and genuine tension of Everybody's in L.A.

Sometimes, as in the “Everybody's in L.A.” segment I kept rewinding, that tension produces delightful results. Both Mulaney's original show and ...

TMC · 05-06-2026, 04:29 AM

Netflix currently has no plans bring back Everybody’s Live with John Mulaney for Season 2

It’s been nearly a year since Mulaney’s Everybody’s Live wrapped the first of a two-season order of his weekly variety show. But asked by Variety if Everybody’s Live will come back, Netflix standup boss Robbie Craw responded: “We don’t think so, no. John is on a big tour. There’s no talk of him doing that right now.”

03-14-2025, 11:56 PM	#1
TMC Member Forum Idol Join Date: Jan 09, 2001 Posts: 125,569	Everybody's Live with John Mulaney felt aimless in its debut episode https://www.npr.org/2025/03/13/nx-s1...h-john-mulaney "There were lots of moments when it seemed like Mulaney was trying hard to deconstruct all the tropes we have come to expect from traditional talk shows – from the chummy announcer/sidekick to calls from viewers, just like the phone-ins venerated CNN host Larry King featured," says Eric Deggans of Mulaney's new weekly Netflix variety series. "But the offhand, randomly eccentric vibe distilled in Mulaney's debut Wednesday didn't feel so much like a bold reinvention of talk shows as an uncomfortable middle ground between parody and mimicry. And instead of lending an air of danger or anything-can-happen excitement, the show's live element just added an overarching pressure which seemed to stifle the proceedings rather than elevate them. A lot of the show's vibe was first revealed in Netflix's six-night experiment last year, John Mulaney Presents: Everybody's in L.A.: the roomy set with ornate doors for guests, announcer/onstage foil Richard Kind, appearances by the autonomous delivery drone Saymo and the spot-on choice of theme music, Wang Chung's 1985 hit To Live and Die in L.A. But while last year's debut was an entertaining jumble of esoteric ideas – kicked off with a masterful monologue on the absurdity of Los Angeles – the first episode of Everybody's Live on Wednesday felt a bit more aimless." ALSO: Thankfully, Everybody's Live didn't stray too much from Everybody's in L.A.: "The ‘70s-inspired set on a Hollywood soundstage proved a metaphor for the transition from one-off experiment to a three-month run of a dozen weekly episodes: mostly the same, with minor tweaks only apparent to a small subset of nerdy aficionados," says Alison Herman. "That’s great news for fans like myself, having named Everybody’s in LA one of the best shows of last year in my annual roundup. It’s nonetheless surprising how non-expository Wednesday’s technical debut was. The presence of Saymo the delivery robot, for example, went unexplained. Mulaney’s four-wheeled friend needed no introduction for those who watched the bug-eyed apparatus develop into a full-fledged character last spring, but neophytes dropping in on a major launch from a worldwide streamer may have been left scratching their heads. Mulaney may have cracked that the name change came after focus groups showed audiences didn’t like LA, but nothing else about the show felt focus-grouped or planned with mass appeal in mind." Everybody's Live's first episode was marred by subpar execution: "The first show was a bit of an awkward mess—not that he seemed too concerned about it," says Chris Murphy. "Wearing a maroon blazer and shirt, Mulaney came out to deliver the monologue while inexplicably holding a clipboard. As the show went on, it became clear that he was crossing things off along the way—suggesting that the clipboard provided some type of road map for the show." Murphy adds: "Though his attitude was decidedly laissez-faire, Mulaney really did seem to be opening up, letting us into his life and his (pretend) home. The show’s warm and comfortable set—modeled after a Los Angeles living room with a grand piano, a telescope, and a view of the city—contained framed photos of Mulaney and his wife, actor Olivia Munn. Rather than going for topical humor in the monologue (though he made one solid Luigi Mangione joke), he veered toward the personal....Thankfully, opening up about his personal life didn’t stop Mulaney from doing what he does best: telling jokes, and edgy ones at that." Everybody's Live picks up where Everybody's in L.A. left off: "Everybody’s Live’s spark comes from the tension between that warm, welcoming atmosphere and the barely-constrained chaos of its production," says Garrett Martin. "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." Whatever Everybody's Live sacrificed in looking a skosh more coherently produced, it gained in looking more comfortable with its quirks: "It didn’t look like it was straining to re-invent the format; it mostly looked like a rearrangement of the atoms," says Bill Carter. "A little Letterman here, a little Conan there, a notable strain of SNL, mixed with Donahue taking live calls and Suze Orman telling you how to spend your money. The genre familiarity worked to ease a viewer through the slightly bent, consistently appealing style. Mulaney possesses every element needed for a strong late-night host: charm, charisma, playfulness. Most importantly, he can be counted on to be funny." Everybody's Live is eerily similar to Everybody's in L.A.: "Everybody’s Live With John Mulaney is an odd duck of an interview show that could either redefine the way viewers consume late night television or just another of Netflix’s iffy experiments to bring live content to subscribers," says Matthew Creith. "Mulaney leans heavily on his relationships with former Saturday Night Live colleagues like (Fred) Armisen and Tracy Morgan, the latter appearing on tonight’s episode as a fictional African leader named King Latifah. Like Graham Norton, Mulaney delights in bringing on a mixture of guests to regale his audience with humorous stories from their past, but the other segments simply don’t land as much as the host wishes they would. Much like Everybody’s in L.A., the whacky approach that Everybody’s Live With John Mulaney takes is an acquired taste that ignores its studio audience by relishing in its own absurdity." It's okay that John Mulaney dialed down the weirdness of Everybody's in L.A.: "Having a loose housing for Mulaney’s eccentric ideas served Everybody’s in L.A. quite well, and losing the city as a centerpiece for Everybody’s Live suggested the new series could be broadening out," says Ben Travers. "After all, this isn’t a limited week-long run anymore. This is a 12-episode order. A full season. A new series. And with an extremely popular comedian at the helm, Netflix executives undoubtedly see an opportunity to attract a wide audience — one more shot at reinventing the late-night talk show for the streaming age, a la Chelsea, The Break with Michele Wolf, Patriot Act with Hasan Minhaj, and others. So if dialing back the weird a little means dialing up the viewership (and keeping Mulaney around, season after season), why not give it a go?" John Mulaney brought back his entire Everybody's in L.A. writing staff and added two more writers for Everybody's Live Joan Baez derailed Everybody's Live's first show by attacking President Trump

04-26-2025, 12:31 AM	#4
TMC Member Forum Idol Join Date: Jan 09, 2001 Posts: 125,569	John Mulaney roasts Neil deGrasse Tyson on Everybody’s Live: "Don’t make that guy your front-facing dude" According to Cracked, Mulaney took on the famed astrophysicist on last night’s show, saying: “Do you want to be less vulnerable, science? Get better messengers. The people they push out there like Bill Nye, and that — don’t get me started on that Neil deGrasse Tyson. He was rude to me once on a podcast, so it’s kinda personal. But, then again, everything’s personal. I just, I don’t know.” It's unclear what Tyson did to Mulaney, who appeared on the astrophysicist's StarTalk Live! podcast in 2022. ALSO: John Mulaney criticized for his joke about the deaths of Gene Hackman and Betsy Arakawa Rita Moreno bowed out as an Everybody’s Live guest Wednesday because she’s “on the mend” after a minor health incident — she was replaced by Tina Fey

04-11-2025, 08:21 PM	#2
TMC Member Forum Idol Join Date: Jan 09, 2001 Posts: 125,569	Everybody's Live with John Mulaney delivers its most accessible episode yet "Make no mistake: Everybody’s Live with John Mulaney is still offbeat and often delightfully befuddling," says Dennis Perkins. "But over the last two weeks, whether intentionally or not, it seems to have hit a certain stride that one imagines would make it a bit more scrutable to the average Netflix viewer. It doesn’t hurt that Mulaney’s guest list for Episode 5 included a trio of recognizable faces in Bill Hader, Chelsea Peretti, and Jackass‘ Johnny Knoxville (who Mulaney states in all sincerity should be next in line for a Kennedy Center honor for his contributions to American comedy). And if the series’ conceit of tossing out an extremely loose organizing theme for the episode (this week it was 'getting fired') is as seemingly unrelated to the guests as ever, at least Mulaney finally explains of Everybody’s Live‘s topics, 'It’s just whatever I want.'" ALSO: David Letterman to return to John Mulaney’s couch next week.

04-17-2025, 06:02 PM	#3
TMC Member Forum Idol Join Date: Jan 09, 2001 Posts: 125,569	David Letterman’s visit to John Mulaney's Everybody's Live was a "meeting of two masters of showbiz irony" "Almost exactly a decade after Letterman said goodbye to his reign as all-time iconic talk show host, seeing the carelessly bearded Dave bantering with the natty Mulaney on this week’s Everybody’s Live is to watch past and present confront each other with different shades of ironic laughter, says Dennis Perkins of Letterman's second visit to Mulaney's couch after appearing on Everybody's in L.A. last year. “Letterman, in his long and storied career, was a consummate put-on artist in the guise of a traditional talk show ringleader. He peppered interviews with visiting movie stars with a glinting detachment from the usual chat show scripted banter and canned anecdotes. Dave was always Dave, his midwestern skepticism uncowed by tradition and glamor, yet reveling in the comic possibilities afforded by his unlikely position. John Mulaney, weaned as he was on Letterman’s style as generations of comics have been, presides over his own version of the late-night show. His is a mutant offshoot of the form that relishes in the largesse of streaming ubiquity while still affording the longtime stand-up and TV writing maestro freedom to indulge his own take-me-or-leave-me vision. Everybody’s Live is a late-night show untroubled by the need to chase ratings or the latest stars—it’s Mulaney, with Netflix cash and a career’s worth of comedy cred, viewing the genre as a toy chest of bits, skits, and people he just wants to hang out with. His show is at once deeply personal and airily offhand." ALSO: John Mulaney explains why being a parent to a toddler is like working on The Ellen DeGeneres Show.

05-01-2025, 07:12 PM	#5
TMC Member Forum Idol Join Date: Jan 09, 2001 Posts: 125,569	John Mulaney's Everybody's Live roasts Bill Belichick and Jordon Hudson Richard Kind dressed like Belichick while Everybody's Live writer Fran Gillespie played his girlfriend in a spoof Hudson's viral interruption of Belichick's CBS Sunday Morning interview. ALSO: Everybody's Live reimagines Phish as Seinfeld.

05-16-2025, 03:51 AM	#6
TMC Member Forum Idol Join Date: Jan 09, 2001 Posts: 125,569	Everybody's Live with John Mulaney is missing the shared curiosity and genuine tension of Everybody's in L.A. Sometimes, as in the “Everybody's in L.A.” segment I kept rewinding, that tension produces delightful results. Both Mulaney's original show and ...

05-06-2026, 04:29 AM	#7
TMC Member Forum Idol Join Date: Jan 09, 2001 Posts: 125,569	Netflix currently has no plans bring back Everybody’s Live with John Mulaney for Season 2 It’s been nearly a year since Mulaney’s Everybody’s Live wrapped the first of a two-season order of his weekly variety show. But asked by Variety if Everybody’s Live will come back, Netflix standup boss Robbie Craw responded: “We don’t think so, no. John is on a big tour. There’s no talk of him doing that right now.”