John Mulaney Hosts a Talk Show For a Good Time, Not a Long Time

Adam Rose/Courtesy of Netflix

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If there’s one net positive of Peak TV, it’s the streamers' need for content and their propensity to cozy up to established names with big ideas to feed the beast. For every dull cash grab (made by A-listers who just need a new beach house, for viewers with one eye on their phones) we get something delightfully weird that feels like it wouldn’t exist without a Chief Content Officer signing blank checks and asking minimal questions.

Such has been the (apparent) nature of John Mulaney’s relationship with Netflix. In 2019 he delivered a special called The Sack Lunch Bunch, which the New Yorker aptly described as “not quite a children’s show for adults and not quite an adult show for children.” Last week, Mulaney returned to the platform with Everybody’s in LA, which is not quite a talk show and not quite a public access show about Los Angeles. Catch the last live episode, which streams tonight at 7 p.m. ET, and binge the first five over the weekend.

In an interview I did with Mulaney a while back—yes, that John Mulaney interview—I told him his recurring appearances on Late Night With Seth Meyers made me wonder if he might try hosting a talk show of his own. His response: “I had two ideas for a talk show once. And by ideas, I mean I thought about them in the privacy of my own room. One would be just interviewing people who do anything that interests me…It would be like a talk show set and they'd come out and there'd be a band and so forth. I always wanted to do a talk show where the guest is always someone from a job that I don't understand. I'd love to interview a dog catcher and be like, ‘What is that like? How do you feel about yourself? I'm not judging, but I am, a little. How do you feel rounding up dogs and taking them to the pound?’”

Everybody’s in LA is essentially the show that he described to me four years ago. The conceit: For six weeknights, Mulaney hosts an organized-chaos live show loosely held together by a focus on one of the city’s idiosyncrasies (like, say, the idea that a coyote might just pop out and show you what’s up). Guests plop down to shoot the shit with John on a set that gives cozy modernist Silverlake living room; middle-aged A-list comedians share the couch with non-famous experts on subjects of local interest (palm trees, coyotes, and so on.) Richard Kind is Mulaney’s Ed McMahon/Andy Richter; musical guests have included California residents St. Vincent and Joyce Manor.

Mulaney—a Chicago native and longtime New Yorker who now lives on the west coast with his family—has a genuine and charming curiosity about the city, and his bemusement powers some great bits; his first-night monologue about L.A.’s geographic absurdity will be a foundational text. This isn’t a love letter to the city from a native like, say, Issa Rae’s Insecure. But it isn’t an alien mocking his strange new environment either. It feels like Mulaney genuinely asking the questions every transplant has, but never gets around to Wikipedia-ing—or calling up a tree activist—to find the answer.

Come for Mulaney’s impish, irreverent tone, sharp as ever in recurring bits like rushed conversations with live callers; big gets like Jerry Seinfeld or Jon Stewart being hilariously frustrated with the show’s randomness; local LA flavor in the form of a SayMo, the robot delivery agents who roam West LA’s sidewalks. Stay for genuinely fun detours into L.A. history, like a visit to the Los Feliz Branch Library’s Leonardo DiCaprio Computer Center, which the actor donated because the building sits on the former site of his childhood home, or a bizarre O.J. Simpson trial reunion between guests Marcia Clark and Zoey Tur, the legendary reporter who’s been credited with inventing “helicopter journalism.” (Sadly the only dissenting perspective on “ghetto bird” culture, as it were, comes from the only guest of color, the comedian Earthquake, who tries his best.) Where else can you see all this, plus Richard Kind dancing to Warren G’s performance of “Regulate”?

As a native New Yorker going on my eighth month in Hollywood and still trying to make sense of this place, this is the commiserative content I didn’t know I needed. This would be appointment viewing even if it wasn’t temporary, although you get the sense hosting a pre-cancelled talk show was part of the appeal. (An early wisecrack in the inaugural monologue is Mulaney promising that with its built-in ending, the show will never find its groove). In one early episode, Mulaney jokingly rebukes the sentiment that the show is funny because it’s so chaotic—this is him trying his best to be organized. The charm is in the tension.

Originally Appeared on GQ