“Everyone live with John Mulaney” is not entirely a new show. Instead, the series is the evolution of ‘Everybody’s in LA’, a pop-up concept and apparently test run-set to the Netflix is a joke festival last year. After producing six episodes in eight days, Mulaney lasted 10 months to do the series again in a little less hyper -regional, but no less idiosyncratic.
“10 months is the perfect amount of time to forget how to do this show,” Mulaney joked in his monologue. But the next hour it made it clear that the comedian and his employees forgot, and in fact changed, very little of that first sprint. (That Mulaney referred to – and continued to refer to – “Everyone is in La” as “this show”, not a separate, was an accurate preview.) Richard Kind is still the announcer; The center of the hour is still a growing panel that combines celebrities with non-famous experts in their field; Mulaney still asks callers in what kind of car they drive, because although everyone may not be in LA anymore, He Certainly. The 1970s inspired set on a Hollywood soundstage turned out to be a metaphor for the transition from one-off experiment to a three-month run of a dozen weekly episodes: usually the same, with small tweaks that are only apparent to a small subset of nerdy lovers.
That is great news for fans like me, after he mentioned “Everybody’s in La” one of the best shows last year in my annual Roundup. It is surprising how non-exposure on Wednesday was the technical debut. For example, the presence of Saymo The delivery robot was inexplicable. The four-wheel friend of Mulaney did not need any introduction for those who have seen the device with the insects with an insect eyes develop into a full-fledged character last spring, but neophhytes who came in on a large launch of a global streamer may have been scratched. Mulaney may have cracked that the name change came after focus groups showed that the audience did not like LA, but did not feel anything else about the show focused or planned with a massive attraction in mind.
“Everybody’s live” takes on his five -member panel, partly because the discussion took most of the delivery: often strange and unusual, but in a way that makes a transcendent craziness possible when the stars tune. Without the possibility of editing and sharpening a pre-gave segment, the Chit-Chat between actor Michael Keaton and personal financial columnist Jessica Roy could borrow on the selected subject of the Night money to friends and family-oriented wander. (Keaton threw his delivery of a story about Jack Nicholson’s “$ 500 Junkie Buyout” strategy, although his impression was pretty big.) Yet we were also treated to folk singer Joan Baez who told her that she had her brand new Tesla in an oak tree.
Part of what made “Everybody’s in La” so exciting was how it cost the cultural decline of the talk show as an opportunity. Instead of submitting to the endless grinding of daily headlines or to rely on Stars’s promotional schedules to book guests, the show would embrace the niche fascination where his genre was already trending – the treatment of “talk show” as an aesthetics to be tried and not to meet any expectations. “Everybody’s live” maintains this spirit of chaos and curiosity, with all the risks associated with it. Despite a more regular schedule than its predecessor, the show is not in danger to become Netflix’s answer to “Late Night” or “The Tonight Show”.
Broadening the Focus from Los Angeles and his many contradictions to more general indications has its growing pains. I didn’t feel the same infectious enthusiasm from Mulaney for financial etiquette as, for example, the OJ Simpson case. On the other hand, it would be difficult to protect a Willy Loman focus group in a broadcast with the South California theme. That sketch, which came just before the final performance of the episode of Cypress Hill, was the peak of the hour and contained all the promise of small obsessions in a choir of possession of owners who shouted a monologue as one.
“Everybody’s live” will continue to have hiccups as it decreases in his new schedule, because Hiccups are built into the blueprint of a show that Live Callers asks and lets the host respond in real time. (I have a number of follow-up questions about the high-tech training of the Redondo Beach trainer.) For all Mulaney’s self-contamination there is still a confidence to immediately pick back where he had stayed almost a year ago. Nothing else on TV vibrates on the same frequency as “Everybody’s Live”, in Née “Everybodies in LA.” It is up to us to coordinate us.