Conventional wisdom would have us believe that the late-night talk show is in its waning days. Perhaps that’s one reason John Mulaney‘s most unconventional talk show has struck such a nerve, at least among those rooting for the genre’s survival.
Everything’s Live with John Mulaney wraps its first 12-episode season tonight live at 10pm in the Eastern time zone in North America, 7pm in LA, 4 pm in Honolulu, 3am in London, 5am in Cairo, 7:30am in Mumbai, and 11am in Tokyo.
Will people be watching in all those locations, sleep-deprived or in mid breakfast?
It’s hard to say. Nobody outside Netflix’s secret fortress of data has any idea specifically how many people have watched the show’s 12-episode first season (or its six-episode “event series” predecessor last year), but that accounting doesn’t seem to matter much anyway.
Mulaney has made a mark with a show that has been described as everything from avant-garde to aimless, inventive to just plain weird.
And that seems to be exactly what Mulaney, a prototypically likeable, charming, unconventional, boy-next-door, recovering-drug-addict host was going for.
Very few works of comedy entertainment get not only accepted but embraced for their moments of awkward silence. Everybody has because viewers (and perhaps even more so, critics) seem to be longing for a shakeup in the standard formula of late night: topical monologue, some other piece of comedy, two guests pushing their latest projects, a musical performance, and “goodnight everybody.’
Of course, historically there’s been a good reason for that formula: it tends to produce reliable entertainment on a regular basis.
Mulaney’s show may not be any more reliably funny, but it has been, without a doubt, more reliably surprising.
Superficially the show looks familiar: couch-bound panel, host doing a monologue, sidekick laughing too much, and the occasional pre-taped segment.
It played out as many first late-night seasons have, with both the host and the production values improving, figuring it all out as it went along.
What was indisputably distinctive was Everybody’s willingness to celebrate its anarchic energy, which sometimes meant anarchic low energy. In an on-screen message preceding episode six, the show offered a warning to viewers:
“Everybody’s Live features abrupt tonal jumps, continuity errors, and various celebrities not knowing when to speak. These have been known to cause seizures.”
This was intended as a joke, of course, but it also signaled a show finding itself, as if to say “Yup that’s what we are.”
Among the season’s guests were two previous practitioners of late-night reinvention, David Letterman and Conan O’Brien. Mulaney called Letterman the greatest late-night host ever and openly acknowledged how much his show was indebted to O’Brien.
A video bit interviewing stunt doubles from the film Terminator II was a remote in the Letterman vein, tastily spiced with the overtly Conan-esque, seemingly purposeless inclusion of performers from a previous video about actors who had played Willy Loman from Death of a Salesman—still around because their cars hadn’t arrived yet.
The major difference in how Everybody’s handled the deliberate, incongruity-based comedy in the bit was the complete absence of audience laughter, as though the audience in the studio wasn’t able to watch the video at the same time as the viewers at home.
Bizarre? Yes, that was the point. Still funny? Mostly, but the message to viewers seemed to be: You’re on your own if you laugh at this.
The guest interactions have also improved over time, perhaps because familiarity with the show’s tone was able to bring some comfort to guests struggling to follow the meandering conversations. Despite the viewer warning, later guests did know, at least somewhat better, when to speak.
Not that the host always knew when to go to them for something funny. Letterman, who beyond his host achievements, has always been one of the best late-night guests ever to grace a couch, several times seemed about to jump in during his visit but was passed over.
Part of that is built into segments that include multiple celebrities, a guest expert, the sidekick, Richard Kind, and some random and often self-important caller all vying for attention. But again, Mulaney got better juggling the bowling pins as the season went on. If he continues at it, he will have fewer pins hitting the floor.
Letterman joked about the show being able to edit out jokes that flop during post-production, but of course none of that can be done during the live worldwide transmission. That accounts for the awkward dead moments in every episode that you would not see in most late-night shows. Some of those shows are edited more heavily than others, noticeable in things like quick cutaways from a monologue joke that missed to a laughing band leader.
But the thing that undergirds all the original elements of Everybody’s Live is that last word. It is a show flying without a net, and that’s the biggest thing behind the attention the show has gotten: it’s that moment at the circus when everybody holds their breath. It is the most crucial element of Everybody’s Live.
Besides Mulaney himself, that is. The truism that these shows are primarily about the host is undiminished.
The intimacy that marks the relationship of late-night host with viewers he/she has never met and mostly never will is critical to bringing them back again and again. When a host’s life becomes part of the nightly connection—Carson’s divorces, Jimmy Kimmel’s fight for his baby son, Conan’s heartbreak over losing The Tonight Show, Letterman’s many personal revelations—it creates a bond unlike any with a television “character.”
Mulaney is not straining to make this connection, he simply drops in references to his past troubles with drugs because they are part of who he is. When he cites having to sell a Rolex watch to buy cocaine, the audience laughs, but not because it’s a joke. They are signaling their support for the guy not the comic.
All that helps because a show can’t get by on oddness alone.
Everybody’s Live is still a new dog. Expect new tricks.
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“Nobody outside Netflix’s secret fortress of data has any idea specifically how many people have watched the show’s 12-episode first season”
There’s 3 comments on your article about the return of Byron Allen’s Comics Unleashed and none about this show. Kinda says it all.