John Mulaney's Playhouse

On his new live talk show, the comedian can do whatever he wants. What exactly is that?

- KATHRYN VANARENDONK

Nine days before the debut of Everybody’s Live With John Mulaney, Mulaney and the writing staff are gathered around a table at Sunset Gower Studios in Hollywood. It’s mid-afternoon, and the writers are kicking around ideas they imagine might come up during the first episode, which Mulaney has decided will be on the topic of lending people money. Within minutes, they start throwing out hypotheticals and personal experiences. “If you lend a relative money to build a greenhouse and they end up building an addition to their home with it, is that okay?” Mulaney asks the group. Quickly it’s clear that this happened recently with Mulaney’s mother-in-law, whom he calls Miss Kim. “I don’t mean to sow division, but she fucked you,” writer Langston Kerman says. “Because?” Mulaney asks. “Because she knew it wasn’t a greenhouse from the beginning,” Kerman says.

Everybody’s Live is an hourlong weekly show streaming live on Netflix, a reinvention of the late-night talk-show format. “It’s my live, jazzlike, unpredictable talk show,” Mulaney says in the March 12 premiere’s opening monologue. “Netflix has given me an hour to introduce my fans to the baby-boomer culture that has made me the unsettled weirdo that I am today.” An extension of a six-episode experiment in May 2024, Everybody’s Live is heavily filtered through Mulaney’s own experiences and preferences, from the topics to the panelists to the musical guests to the references. The show provides endless space for Mulaney’s sharp comedic instincts and gives him a platform to work out the contours of his shifting onstage persona since marrying actor Olivia Munn and becoming a father. It also leaves plenty of room to slip into his blind spots, to expose all the risks of the kind of format that’s determined to stay deliberately, stubbornly loose.

All of those pitfalls are visible in the premiere.