There’s something so ineffably right about the report of Netflix being unhappily surprised by the first episode of Everybody’s Live With John Mulaney. Last week’s first outing of this continuation of John Mulaney Presents: Everybody’s in LA was a familiar grab-bag of filmed sketches, Los Angeles slice-of-life interludes, and offhand chat with Mulaney’s famous friends, people Mulaney just wanted to meet, and the odd expert on the night’s purported topic.
According to Mulaney, Netflix wanted a more “buzzy and exciting” lineup of notables, with the comic’s choice of friend/SNL colleague Fred Armisen and folkie/activist legend Joan Baez apparently not meeting those criteria for the premiere. (Never mind that the clip of the 84-year-old Baez happily dancing to musical guests Cypress Hill doing “Hits from the Bong” went daffily viral.)
But that’s what you get when you hand John Mulaney the keys. The Chicago native has been in entertainment for most of his adult life, but his comic sensibility is that of the perennial wry outsider, a show biz pro who delivers jokes like a stand-up lifer while tilting the angles on his schtick just enough to let us know he’s in on the absurdity of it all.
And so episode two of Everybody’s Live went live with Netflix’s reported objections and a cheeky promo that mocked the streamer’s odd rigidity echoing around the show’s homey environs. (Those ostentatiously cheesy glass grapes could totally have been swiped off of Merv Griffin’s set.)
The guests (Quinta Brunson, Nick Kroll, Ben Stiller, and cruise ship industry expert Anne Kalosh) certainly weren’t booked to bring the “sizzle” so much as chummy insider repartee for Mulaney to bounce off of. Sure, Stiller’s got Severance and Brunson Abbot Elementary, both “buzzy” hits, but neither they nor Mulaney’s “work wife” Kroll talked shop—it was all cruise ships.
Why cruise ships? Mulaney deadpanned that the floating recreational facilities/occasional legionnaire’s disease incubators were “the most divisive issue of our time,” but mainly, as with most of Mulaney’s topics, it was just an organizing principle for him and his guests to field and riff on live phone calls.
And here’s where you can sort of see Netflix’s point—even if you get the sense that execs are missing Mulaney’s. Packing stellar stand-up comic Mulaney and a handful of high-profile celebrities into an L.A. talk show studio invites certain expectations, none of which are truly met. Even the live aspect barely figures into the show’s insular world, with only musical guest Kim Gordon‘s now somehow controversial sweatshirt emblazoned with the words “Gulf of Mexico” even hinting at a world outside Mulaney’s studio.
Mulaney rides gently funny herd over both callers and guests, shepherding the conversation with asides more earnestly curious than they are hilarious. Mulaney apologetically cuts one long-winded caller off because his story “has become a yarn.” A woman introduces the fact that she and her husband are permanent cruise ship residents, which perks up the panel’s ears. (Cruise expert Kalosh says it’s rare, but it’s real.)
And the best story belongs to former cruise ship dancer John, whose revelation that he was expected to potentially shoot unruly passengers with the supplied lifeboat gun while wearing his spangly dance outfit had Mulaney and company reacting in open-mouthed shock.
The same goes for this week’s running filmed piece, a conversation with an L.A. based rabbi that veers permanently into his love for the movie Crimson Tide. Sure, the rabbi halfheartedly attempts to steer the Tony Scott submarine thriller’s themes into religious life lessons, but it’s mostly about how great Gene Hackman and Denzel Washington are in it. As with the studio conversation, there’s no real comic punchline to the piece, which functions as sort of a punchline on its own. Everybody’s Live, like Everybody’s in L.A. is a low-key put-on, Mulaney treating the very concept of him helming a talk show as part of a private, smart-alecky joke.
Another in-studio bit sees rapper Silkk the Shocker come out to receive Mulaney’s solemnly presented “No Limits Soldier” commemorative flag “for his service.” Silkk is, well, smooth as he plays along with the deadpan (and audience-baffling) bit, with Kind offhandedly telling him to just use the very real embroidered flag as “a bedspread or something.” Nobody involved winks about the randomness or deliberate fizzling of the bit—which is part of the bit.
Vanessa Bayer turned up in the other filmed piece, playing the beta-tested Netflix A.I. Jerrica. Like the promo for this week’s episode, it’s an affectionate nibble at the corporate hands feeding Mulaney, with the eerily glitchy Jerrica scanning a viewer’s history and recommending “petite bland twins real estate show” or one “set in the South but somehow also Korean.” It’s the closest Everybody’s Live comes to a Tim & Eric bit, with Mulaney’s Saturday Night Live pal Bayer’s voice jarringly switching tones as Jerrica’s algorithm shifts abruptly from chipper helpfulness to dead-eyed approximation of the hu-man.
The other big draw—for John Mulaney at least—was the first-ever live performance from the two Kims. Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon kicked off the episode with a solo song, The Pixies’ and Breeders’ Kim Deal did one too, and then they both came back at the end of the show to duet on Sonic Youth’s “Little Trouble Girl,” on which Deal had sung backup in 1995. Like the guests he invites to hang out on his studio couches, the sense is that these are just two formative musicians from the young Mulaney’s life, he has Netflix money, and it would be neat to make some minor-key history with a 30-year-old song.
Kim Gordon and Kim Deal perform "Little Trouble Girl" as THE KIMS on Everybody's Live with John Mulaney. #EverybodysLive pic.twitter.com/cMtYEw799G
— Netflix (@netflix) March 20, 2025
And then it’s over, Deal and Gordon’s atonal art rock vibrating incongruously while Mulaney, clipboard in hand, bids his comfy guests and lightly bemused viewers adieu. Everybody’s Live is John Mulaney’s treehouse. He invites who he wants, picks the games, doodles stuff he thinks is funny (which, being Mulaney, it invariably is), and lures musicians he likes with Netflix money to play for them all.
Opening on a pair of bits with venerable character actor and straight-faced weirdo sidekick Kind “with two completely different energies,” Mulaney, perhaps referencing last week’s mixed reviews, apologizes that the show still has “some kinks to work out.” (Despite, as he says, “working in a format that has only gone on continuously on television for 75 years.”) But there’s no indication that Everybody’s Live is anything other than what Mulaney wants it to be.
Episode 3 of Everybody’s Live with John Mulaney streams live on Netflix Wednesday, March 26, at 10 PM ET/7 PM PT.
Get stories like this in your inbox: Sign up for LateNighter’s free daily newsletter.
