Everyone’s in Los Angeles: John Mulaney has what the late night needs

ILet’s get one thing straight: John Mulaney has no intention of becoming the full-time host of a late-night show. He confirmed this in the monologue that opened his six-night stint at the helm of John Mulaney Presents: Everyone is in Los Angeles, the Netflix talk show that runs concurrently with the streaming giant’s annual Los Angeles-based comedy event, Netflix Is a Joke Fest. (Episodes will air live at 10 p.m. ET through Friday and are subsequently available to stream on the platform.) “No matter what happens this week, we’re done on May 10,” he told the audience at studio and viewers around the world. “What is awesome. ‘Cause there’s nothing I’d love to be more than done.”

Fair. O Everybody’s in Los Angeles concept — Chicago native Mulaney and a panel of Netflix-affiliated comics and thematically appropriate guests dissect a different aspect of L.A. life each night — is very specific (not to mention heavily reliant on everyone actually being in L.A.) to fuel an indefinite run. But the four episodes that have aired so far prove that Mulaney’s acclaimed gigs as host of Spiritual Awards and, last January, the discreet Oscar speech Governors Awards they were not accidents. As much as I hate to admit this about yet another white guy with the name J, he has what it takes to be the best nightlife personality of his generation, at a time when the format seems more desperate than ever for a savior.

It helps that he’s so different from his famous contemporaries. There are two predominant schools of late-night comedy now — the gently indulgent variety practiced by Jimmy Fallon and James Corden, before he left CBS last year; and the polemicist model was a pioneer when returning Daily Program host Jon Stewart (who was a guest on Monday’s edition of Everybody’s in Los Angeles) and adopted by acolytes from John Oliver to Samantha Bee and Hasan Minhaj. Network reps like Seth Meyers, Jimmy Kimmel, and Stephen Colbert mix the latter modes with varying degrees of success, though Meyers can be too calm, Kimmel too broody, and Colbert a little shallow.

Mulaney, on the other hand, is likable without seeming vapid or obstinate, and open-minded without being overtly political. In this sense, he is reminiscent of Dick Cavett, the erudite conversationalist whose long-running talk show felt like listening to a dinner party attended by luminaries from all walks of life. The panel on Wednesday’s “paranormal” edition of Everybody’s in Los Angeles included comics Sarah Silverman, Ronny Chieng and Tom Segura; Cassandra Peterson, also known as Elvira, Mistress of the Dark; and Kerry Gaynor, who Mulaney introduced as “the hypnotherapist who made me quit smoking” but who also happened to be a paranormal investigator in the 1970s. A responsive moderator, Mulaney keeps the conversation flowing among studio guests, effectively stimulating viewers who call into the show live through anecdotes related to each night’s theme and seem to know exactly when to change the subject.

In his curiosity and his ability to telegraph his amusement about his fellow man, in all his strangeness, Mulaney also harkens back to Johnny Carson, David Letterman, and even Everybody’s in Los AngelesThe most prominent guest, Jerry Seinfeld, at his straight man best. As many of today’s braggarts fail to understand, the best late-night hosts don’t make the show all about themselves. His job is to act as master of ceremonies for experienced and inexperienced guests, making spokespeople for nonprofit organizations, like the few who appeared on Mulaney’s show, as loose and comfortable as comedians — and mentoring people. like Seinfeld, which is in the middle of a terrible press traverse for your Netflix Pop-Tarts movie Thawedof your most hacked hobby horses.

That’s not to say Mulaney doesn’t have a personality. A highlight of Everybody’s in Los Angeles has been his deadpan monologues. In the premiere, he made around 10 minutes of jokes using a map of Los Angeles neighborhoods as a visual aid, and he never made a mistake. (“A lot of people are always wondering: What happened to New York in the ’70s? It moved to downtown Los Angeles, where it’s thriving.”) Not all of his pre-recorded sketches turned out well, but the best of them — like a tongue-in-cheek focus group of true L.A. punk elders — thrive on Mulaney and his writers’ pop-culture geek enthusiasm. If a certain segment crosses your mind, wait for the next one; Who but the most humorless killjoy wouldn’t want to see mental health professionals diagnose comedians, including Mulaney, based on clips from their stand-up specials?

The live element keeps the show exciting, with a packed list of guests, discussion topics, and jokes that avoid silence. A series of mock interviews with celebrities sitting “courtside” in the audience included Will Ferrell posing as entertainment manager Lou Adler and a female child doing her best Steve Harvey impression. It was a stroke of genius to recruit Richard Kind, who is so quick with a sublimely ridiculous non sequitur, as announcer. During a lull in the action, he pulled out a set of “Richard Kind’s Party Starters” cards and asked the following question: “Why aren’t there more women on the Moon — or to have them?” (A contemporary who deserves some credit for the captivating dishevelment of Everybody’s in Los Angeles is Chris Gethard, whose 2010 live cable variety show became a staple of Fusion and truTV The Chris Gethard Show he also set up eccentric panels and answered calls from viewers.)

Hosting isn’t the only job Mulaney excels at. Firstly, a stand-up that presented intelligent but audience-pleasing specials, before It is After a devastating stay in rehab for alcoholism and drug addiction in 2020, he’s done just about everything that could fall under the umbrella of comedy. He wrote to SNL; sent nonfiction cinema on IFC’s wave of intellectual laughter Documentary now!; and voiced the exuberantly wicked Andrew Glouberman in the Netflix film Big mouththe long-running animated comedy co-created by his college roommate Nick Kroll – with whom Mulaney also co-stars Oh hello banner as a feisty Upper West Side duo in the vein of Statler and Waldorf. He even had his own short-lived sitcom on NBC, Mulaneyin the mid-2010s. On Letterman’s long-running Netflix talk show My next guest needs no introductionhe called his 2019 Netflix children’s special, John Mulaney and the Sack Lunch Gang, his favorite thing he has ever done. (As with the vast majority of the most successful comics of the last decade, Netflix has played an almost monolithic role in Mulaney’s career.)

It would be a shame to see him stop doing any of those weird and wonderful things to sit behind a desk five nights a week, but the late-night format is flexible enough to support many of his existing projects. Everybody’s in Los AngelesThe best pre-recorded segments follow the Oh hello guys on a tour of a Hollywood mansion that they insist is a Charles Manson tour (“The amount of people I’ve killed in my life looking for Candice Bergen!”). A John Mulaney talk show also wouldn’t need to be daily; it could be weekly or monthly, or he could do episodes whenever he wanted, like Letterman does with My next guest. At the very least, now that Dawn is an endangered species and Mulaney is his most promising personality since the great Desus and Mero rift of 2022, I’m crossing my fingers that Netflix does Everybody’s in Los Angeles an annual tradition.