‘Everybody's Live with John Mulaney' Turns a One-Off Experiment Into Consistently Delightful Chaos: TV Review

Yahoo

13-03-2025

'Everybody's Live with John Mulaney' isn't quite a new show. Instead, the series is the evolution of 'Everybody's in LA,' a pop-up concept — and apparently, trial run — timed to the Netflix Is a Joke festival last year. After producing six episodes in eight days, Mulaney took 10 months to retool the series into something 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 made clear the comedian and his collaborators forgot, and in fact changed, very little from that initial sprint. (That Mulaney referred to — and kept referring to — 'Everybody's in LA' as 'this show,' not a separate one, was an accurate preview.) Richard Kind is still the announcer; the hour's centerpiece is still an expanding panel pairing celebrities with non-famous experts in their field; Mulaney still asks callers what kind of car they drive, because while everybody may no longer be in LA, he certainly is. 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.
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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' takes after its five-member panel, in part because the discussion took up the majority of the episode: often odd and offbeat, yet in a way that allows for a transcendent weirdness when the stars align. Without the ability to edit down and tighten a pre-taped segment, the chit-chat between actor Michael Keaton and personal finance columnist Jessica Roy on the night's selected topic — lending money to friends and family — could wander aimlessly. (Keaton sort of flubbed his delivery of a story about Jack Nicholson's '$500 junkie buyout' strategy, although his impression was pretty great.) Yet we were also treated to folk singer Joan Baez narrating the time she crashed her brand-new Tesla into an oak tree, much to the in-studio audience's delight.
Part of what made 'Everybody's in LA' so exciting was in how it took the cultural decline of the talk show as an opportunity. Rather than subjecting itself to the endless grind of daily headlines or relying on stars' promotional schedules to book guests, the show would embrace the niche fascination its genre was already trending toward — treating 'talk show' like an aesthetic to be tried on and toyed with, not a set of expectations to be met. 'Everybody's Live' maintains this spirit of chaos and curiosity, with all the risks that come with it. Despite a more regular schedule than its predecessor, the show is in no danger of becoming Netflix's answer to 'Late Night' or 'The Tonight Show.'
Broadening the focus from Los Angeles and its many contradictions to more general prompts has its growing pains. I didn't feel the same infectious enthusiasm from Mulaney for financial etiquette as, say, the O.J. Simpson case. On the other hand, it would be difficult to shoehorn a Willy Loman focus group into a Southern California-themed broadcast. That sketch, coming just before the episode's closing performance by Cypress Hill, was the hour's peak, containing all the promise of petty obsessions afforded airtime in a chorus of besuited actors shouting a monologue as one.
'Everybody's Live' will continue to have hiccups as it eases into its new schedule, because hiccups are built into the blueprint of a show that solicits live callers and has the host react in real time. (I have some follow-up questions about the Redondo Beach trainer's high-tech workout.) For all Mulaney's self-deprecation, though, there's still a confidence to picking right back up where he left off almost a year ago. Nothing else on TV vibrates at the same frequency as 'Everybody's Live,' née 'Everybody's in LA.' It's on us to attune ourselves.
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