How do you tell the difference between a talk show that reinvents the form so radically that it confounds the viewer’s expectations about what a talk show is and a talk show that just doesn’t work? I wasn’t old enough to experience the 1982 debut of Late Night With David Letterman, but I suspect that it did something like the former. Late-night television is defined by its relationship to time—its regularity, the speed of its production, its time slot, its host’s comic timing, the timeliness of the jokes—and I imagine that early viewers of Letterman’s Late Night initially might have been confused about how this gap-toothed goofball was using the hour allotted to him. One episode was shot entirely from Dave’s first-person point of view. One episode rotated the image on the screen by 90 degrees every 15 minutes. Lots of bits centered around regular people with no screen presence whatsoever who simply tickled Dave for reasons that were unclear to the viewer at home. Letterman’s postmodern, Midwestern folksiness anchored a show that took advantage of the freedom of its 12:30 a.m. time slot—maybe nobody’s watching and we can do whatever we want!—and pushed against the decorum of its time period. It must have been a weird watch. Eventually, however, through repetition and sheer force of will, Letterman began to make sense. The show’s flouting of convention became conventional itself, or at least legible in its idiosyncrasy. Letterman confounded his viewers night after night until they caught on—until, ultimately, the form was changed. A show this good teaches you how to watch it.
I grew up on Dave and his direct inheritor, Conan O’Brien, drawn to their punchy irony and prankish sensibilities as a counterpoint to the puffy populism of Jay Leno’s Tonight Show. And, while I didn’t witness the initial Letterman-quake firsthand, over the course of my life as a viewer, I’ve had similar experiences, feeling first unsettled then exhilarated by Cartoon Network’s Space Ghost Coast to Coast, The Eric Andre Show, and even Between Two Ferns With Zach Galifianakis—all shows that broke the frame in order to find something new, shows you had to learn how to watch.
I don’t yet know how to watch John Mulaney, the Saturday Night Live writer turned stand-up sensation. His Netflix show, Everybody’s Live, which got its start last spring as a weeklong, pop-up, live miniseries, and is resurrected now as a 12-part weekly talk show, has many conventional elements. Mulaney opens with a monologue that is followed by pretaped bits of varying quality, occasional audience gags, celebrity guests on couches, and a musical performance. There are Johnny Carson–Ed McMahon–style exchanges between Mulaney and his on-screen sidekick Richard Kind, and there are Lettermanesque absurdities like the “Saymo” delivery robot that ranges freely around the set. But there are also mischievous fillips to the format, including themed episodes, call-in segments, and deliberately mismatched panel compositions. The first episode, for instance, featured Michael Keaton, Joan Baez, and the personal finance columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle answering viewer calls about loaning money to friends. It’s a weird watch!
Mulaney has a reputation as a writer’s writer, a creative force whose signature spiky millennial classicism has helped shape the comedic taste of a generation. But he’s burnished that talent largely in highly formalized, constrained spaces: the legendarily tough crucible of the SNL writers’ room, the narrow windows of award-show monologues, the tight formal requirements of an hour-long special. Everybody’s Live, despite its Netflix-mandated 60-minute slot, is a much shaggier affair, with more space to roam and fewer boundaries to respect or revise. On Everybody’s Live, Mulaney is, to paraphrase one of his most well-known bits, like a horse loose in a television studio. He’s not reinventing the form or even really pushing it in compelling ways; he’s just making a mess.
In a recent profile, Mulaney related two notes that he received from Netflix. The notes are telling, both as reflections of how the show is, at least conceptually, disrupting the genre of the late-night talk show and of how debilitatingly pleased with itself Everybody’s Live can be. The first note was that, in ordering a full season, Netflix requested that the show not be so much about Los Angeles. In theory, this makes sense; in practice, less so.
When Mulaney’s miniseries debuted last spring, it was called Everybody’s in LA, and one of its invigorating qualities was how specific it was to its locality. Each episode’s theme was catered to a particular issue or phenomenon in contemporary LA, some silly, some relatively serious: coyotes, earthquakes, palm trees, helicopters, etc. Taking advantage of the high density of celebrities in Southern California, the show gathered relatively unknown experts alongside famous faces who were, if only by virtue of their mailing addresses, experts as well. The resulting vibe was a kind of bemused curiosity. Mulaney and his guests would occasionally mock their topics, but they were also genuinely interested. What is this strange place where we live? What if this show explored that strangeness? The miniseries, at its best, came to life in these pockets of particularity: pretaped documentary field interviews with ordinary Angelenos; lovely and poignant interstitial photography from around the city; Marcia Clark, Nate Bargatze, the journalist who first got the footage of O.J. Simpson’s Bronco chase, and a comedian named Earthquake all wearing sunglasses and talking about helicopters.
Complying with Netflix’s note, the new show has—officially, at least—lost its L.A.-specific mandate. This is most visible in Everybody’s Live’s thematic architecture. So far, the themes—loaning people money and cruise ships, among them—have yielded a few entertaining exchanges, but they’ve also sapped the show of one of its signature qualities. Last year, when the panel was discussing the question of replacing all of L.A.’s palm trees in advance of the 2028 Olympics, the topic became both a prompt for improvised comedy as well as a genuine subject of inquiry. Mulaney’s interest, which previously came off as puckish but earnest, now seems feigned. Taking calls on cruise-ship experiences in this season’s second episode, Mulaney even seems almost disdainful of the callers who are interested in the subject. It’s not necessarily that the show misses L.A.—the interstitials are still there, and much of the aesthetic remains gleefully Californian—it’s that the show misses the purpose L.A. provided. Mulaney’s back-and-forth between fascination and fucking around turns out to have been the show’s animating drama.
So that was bad advice, but it wasn’t all bad. At the end of the profile—delightfully observed by Kathryn VanArendonk—Mulaney relates a call he had in advance of the new season’s first episode. Looking at the guest list, which included Baez, Keaton, and the finance columnist, as well as Fred Armisen and Cypress Hill, a Netflix executive apparently said to Mulaney, “This is not the show we sold.” I’m loath to side with network notes, especially coming from a network as risk-averse as Netflix, but they kind of had a point here. Although some moments on Everybody’s Live feel fresh (this season, for instance, a brief, whimsical Brian De Palma parody was an unexpected delight), by and large, the show is filled with ideas that sound conceptually funny but only barely work in practice, like the military salute to rapper Silkk the Shocker.
There’s a kind of punk wonderment about shows like Letterman’s or Eric Andre’s, throwing things at the wall to see if they’d stick. As acidic as they are, there’s a hopeful spirit of formal exploration at work. But Mulaney’s show has a certain sourness, a deliberate lack of wonder, that’s most detectable in his management of the panel portion. On one hand, it’s slightly funny to watch deliberately incongruous guests awkwardly squirm as they try to offer advice to callers, uncertain what exactly they’re supposed to do; on the other hand, it kind of sucks to watch that. It feels Pollyannaish to say it, but there’s something disrespectful about the way this show treats its guests, in person and on the phone. Mulaney is a masterful crafter of jokes; putting him in a high-wire improv setting doesn’t necessarily play to his strengths. And that’s especially true when the improv has to come mostly from the people sitting across from him on the couch. On the first episode—the one the Netflix exec didn’t like—the panel is excruciating. In the second episode, Ben Stiller, Quinta Brunson, and Nick Kroll pick up a lot of slack, but the purposeful aimlessness of these segments makes them unpleasantly chaotic. Their disorganization doesn’t open them to possibility, it leaves them open to something like a meanness of spirit. In the cruise episode, Mulaney gets the biggest laugh of the night from hanging up on a caller; Kroll gets an even bigger laugh from making fun of one. Comedy doesn’t always have to be nice, but the barbs on Everybody’s Live feel less like the deployment of precision weapons than a host and a panel pointlessly lashing out.
When I think back to watching Letterman or Conan as a kid, I have incredibly fond feelings, but they are just that: feelings. I’m aware that I romanticize those shows, in part because of their influence on me and my taste and, honestly, my suburban intellectual odyssey as a teenager. But late-night shows of that era are famously uneven (and, goodness knows, Letterman could be mean). Not everything works, not everything feels the way you want it to. While Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show operated as a kind of wall-to-wall entertainment machine, an efficient TV spectacle where there was never a dull moment, part of Letterman’s revolution was insisting that there should be dull moments. If late-night TV is a mode defined by its relationship to time, maybe the most important aspect of that is its relationship to liveness. There’s something exhilarating about a sudden drop or fissure in the veneer of a live TV show, a glimpse of its contingency; there’s also something boring about it.
The impact of these shows comes in aggregate. In some sense, it’s too soon to tell what the feeling of Mulaney’s show is. But, in another sense, we already know. I liked Everybody’s in LA enough that I’m rooting for this iteration. As much as we viewers have to learn how to watch these types of shows, their hosts and writers have to learn how to make them. And maybe that’s what this show is about, ultimately. Mulaney isn’t going to make one of these a night for 20 years; he’s making 10 more before another break. Maybe what we’re watching is a process, a show becoming itself in real time in front of us. Right now, Everybody’s Live is in its bratty adolescence. There’s something interesting here, even if it’s not all that fun to be around at the moment. But perhaps it will grow to understand itself better, become more confident, less flailing, more mature. The show might not change the form, but it will certainly change its own form. And in a streaming landscape filled with shows that ask very little of themselves or their viewers, this weekly glimpse into a TV series under construction is refreshing, even in its disappointments, even when nobody gets the joke.
