An extension of its 2024 parent series John Mulaney Presents: Everybody’s in L.A., Netflix’s new 12-week series Everybody’s Live with John Mulaney is one of the most ostensibly amateur celebrity talk shows you’ll ever see. Even though it’s riddled with household names, the show feels like a group project, which is precisely what keeps it interesting. Such is the case with most live performances and productions, where no one knows what’s going to happen once the show begins.
But thanks to John Mulaney’s familiar dry personality, his experience as a writer on live television, and his openness with the audience, Everybody’s Live’s best efforts to stitch together a legitimate series of collaborative entertainment make it a respectably authentic form of talk show that people should not be sleeping on.
‘Everybody’s Live with John Mulaney’ Is an Outlier in Talk Show Television
Between daytime and late-night, the majority of today’s talk shows seem to be looking for the same things to talk about every week, which is whatever’s trending. Tamron Hall, Jennifer Hudson, and Kelly Clarkson use their airtime to give inspiration, share underdog stories, and brighten days with videos of children and animals being adorable on social media. On the flipside, Jon Stewart, Seth Meyers, Stephen Colbert, and the Jimmies spend every opening monologue snarkily refreshing audiences with the latest folly of the world’s politicians. All the while, Mulaney and the team at Everybody’s Live do their own thing as a sort of Medium Place amid this Good Place/Bad Place scenario, and each episode simply coasts on one predetermined topic independent of current events.
The people who get invited as guests on the show come to hang out rather than to get into the thick of what’s wrong with the world, and the randomness of each episode’s topic ensures that there is very little room for any one person or subject to monopolize the conversation. Instead of focusing on political debate or how to follow mainstream social practices, conversation on Everybody’s Live is all about striking up unusual, wholesome, and just plain fun discussions from a rotating set of diverse perspectives. The show seldom becomes emotional, and it’s not here to tell you how to feel about the state of the country. It’s here to provide the sweet relief of interesting entertainment and nothing more.
‘Everybody’s Live’ Is One of Late-Night’s Most Self-Aware Talk Shows
Mulaney opens each episode of Everybody’s Live by discussing how the show itself is doing critically, what sorts of changes have been asked of the producers, and other behind-the-scenes factors actively influencing the show, such as the internet flocking to his passing mention of Brazil in a previous episode. Where most live television and talk shows tend to keep their production blemishes out of frame, Mulaney seems unconcerned with how ungraceful his transitions might look, or how blatantly he makes his next segue.
There was a point on Everybody’s in L.A. at which he restarted the reading of a cue card and said aloud, “Let me read it more naturally.” He continues posing his segues in question form, confirming next moves with producer Ashley Edens in his ear, as he religiously clutches a program clipboard who’s become as much a main character as Saymo the delivery robot.
‘Everybody’s Live’ Has John Mulaney’s Comedic Style Written All Over It
Modern late-night TV has begun to emphasize creating “content” out of their segments, which will only really work if the performers “get it right” and perform it correctly on air, lest the show lose a reputation for providing the finest, most relevant, most popular entertainment by the current social climate. Mulaney’s offbeat and observational comedy style allows for a healthy amount of improvisation and disorganization that acknowledges the strangeness of some of the show’s segments. And what that style does best is subvert most of our talk show expectations, leaving us with some of the most memorable live TV moments without a shred of planning to do with them.
Everybody’s Live with John Mulaney is drenched in the specific and unsuspecting style of its host. Not unlike what we’ve seen from his other work, like John Mulaney and the Sack Lunch Bunch (written “for kids, by adults”) and his most recent experimental project, Everybody’s in L.A., Mulaney’s segments can be esoteric more often than not. Whether or not he expects his audience to get the joke, Mulaney frequently writes in obscure bits and dated characters, including Everybody’s in L.A.’s Waingro stand-up bit, and last week’s Butterball the Cenobite Uber Eats bit. These jokes are obviously just for him, but why shouldn’t he enjoy himself on his own show?
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It follows that Mulaney doesn’t shy from “saying it” when a joke or segment isn’t landing with his studio audience. It’s become a staple on the show that Mulaney breaks the fourth wall to address how a bit between himself and sidekick/announcer Richard Kind may just have gone over. We’ve gotten used to his unsubtle we’re-going-to-do-something-funny-now cue card sketch performances, as well as his brandished attitude with call-ins that stresses his callers to get to the good part of their stories.
The “Cruises” episode of Everybody’s Live saw the host lose enough patience with a caller to hang up the phone and cut off their poorly-told tale. He immediately acknowledged the gesture as considerably rude by the emphatic caller, but his choice demonstrated a personal seriousness about maintaining a minimal amount of good writing/storytelling, even from his participating public. These executive decisions and unrehearsed moments are fundamental in depicting Mulaney’s self-respect towards the Everybody’s project.
‘Everybody’s Live’ Resets the Standards for Live TV Everywhere
Ultimately, just like its L.A.-centric predecessor, Everybody’s Live carries itself with an appropriate randomness that encourages both the hosts and the audience to say, “Let’s see where this goes”; a certain built-in margin of error that today’s late-night hosts almost seem to have forgotten as a cornerstone of live performance. It isn’t that John and the team are necessarily making mistakes throughout each episode, but rather, John makes it clear to audiences that he isn’t going to pretend this scrappy little show is nearly as polished or well-executed as the others.
Almost counterintuitively, instead of coming off as purely low-budget or perhaps worthless in comparison to older, more familiar shows, these visible strings reinforce a kind of authenticity that talk shows could stand to learn from.
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