The looseness built into John Mulaney‘s version of the late-night talk show carries risk. Not of being normal, certainly, but of sometimes not quite coming together.
All the ingredients were in place for tonight’s episode, nominally organized as it was around the topic, “Is Uber Good?” (Verdict: inconclusive.)
Mulaney was clearly delighted to have three truly formidable women on his panel (four if you count public transit expert Alyssa Walker) in Amy Sedaris, Sigourney Weaver, and Natasha Lyonne.
Richard Kind was in the house as usual, at one point positing that he’s never actually been Mulaney’s trusty, overqualified sidekick in an eerily filmed Usual Suspects-style mind-f*ck.
And Peter Gallagher popped in to play “future John Mulaney,” who has time-traveled from the year 2055 to warn him against participating in next week’s planned three-on-one fight against four 14-year-old boys. (Future John hints that Mulaney will fall off the wagon in a few years, but since John would turn out looking like Gallagher, that seems like a decent trade.)
And then there was Hamilton and Girls5Eva star Renée Elise Goldsberry as audience member Mrs. T. (So make that five formidable women.)
Sporting the signature T family style of feathers and chains (even though she asserts she dumped that fool long ago), Goldsberry’s Mrs. T, after accusing Mulaney of being “hopped up on ZigZags and dingleberries,” belts out a musical homage to muscle-building creatine powder alongside a pair of burly, dancing, overall-clad dancers, berating her ex for his habit of addressing her in the third person and dressing like “a Native American stripper,” before triumphantly asserting, “The strongest part of you was me.”
What does any of it have to do with Uber? Nothing whatsoever, the whole elaborately silly sideshow being yet another example of Mulaney dragooning Broadway royalty to do a delightfully bananas bit on his show.
But after the all-out triumph that was last week’s episode, this Everybody’s Live felt a little flat, and it mainly comes down to the guests, it’s surprising to say.
There were some pops of color from the chit-chat. Weaver’s anecdote about James Cameron pushing her to do an it-turns-out dangerous bit of business on Aliens reaffirms that James Cameron is sort of a dick.
Plus, Mulaney spending much of his time interviewing the legendary Weaver asking her about a pair of widely circulated photos of the younger Weaver happily cuddling a large pumpkin is just the right side of irreverent. (That Weaver can’t recall the circumstances surrounding the photos testifies to just how eventfully awesome her life’s been.)
And the perennially brassy Lyonne (complaining about the green room “shnacks” in her gangster’s moll cadence) is introduced as “the closer” of his infamous intervention, the pair’s longtime friendship and shared struggles providing a little hum of electricity.
Sedaris, an inveterate chatterbox and talk show eccentric (and favorite guest of Mulaney’s idol David Letterman) is her mischievous, effusive self, derailing her issues with Uber and taxis with talk of her pet rabbits and complaining about the proliferating glass grapes littering Mulaney’s set.
With these three disparately fascinating figures to play off of, however, it’s odd how hesitant and inert much of the extended central couch chat is.
That’s the danger of Everybody’s Live—Mulaney’s conceptual riff on the late-night talk show format counts on alchemy and inspiration, and his guests tonight just didn’t totally gel. Undeniable icon Weaver describes herself at one point as shy, something borne out by the show here, and while Sedaris relishes in hosts’ willingness to let her be eccentric and digressive, she and Mulaney never find a groove. As for Lyonne—third on the couch—I could have listened to her and Mulaney swap shared anecdotes for the entire hour, but what we get here is a bit rushed.
All this is to say that this episode felt a little ordinary. At least as much as it could be with a mid-show segment about Mulaney being ambushed on the show’s studio lot by a trio of diminutive stuntwomen.
Presented as his writers’ exercise to condition Mulaney for next week’s big season finale throwdown with those three teen boys, the chaotic battle comes after a pitch meeting discussion of the looming reality of the 43-year-old Mulaney taking on a collective 42 years’ worth of teens, complete with a narrator ominously suggesting, “John is going to die.” No matter how this all turns out, the build up has been admirably weird and committed to playing out a “seemed like a good idea at the time” bit for all it’s worth.
The callers were the usual mix of anticlimactic fodder for Mulaney (he really seems to enjoy hanging up on people when they get dull or combative), while musical guest Yeule did a more elaborately theatrical number than is usual for the show, Mulaney’s freedom to book artists he genuinely admires as ever lending a level of interest. Add the non-binary Singaporean singer’s avant-garde post-pop to the roster of acts Mulaney has championed this season.
Was this a bad episode of Everybody’s Live? Not remotely. Mulaney’s monologue was as nimble and smartly hilarious as ever. (Honestly, that we get a seven minute Mulaney stand-up bit per week is a present in itself.) Glancing off of the purported topic (Uber described as “Hey, maybe I’m a taxi”) to wind up with a startlingly dark vision of a hitchhiking Mulaney being violated in a dress is the sort of out there conceit that Mulaney’s cheeky schtick can deliver with just the right degree of escalating absurdity. And him toying with his audience by delivering deliberate non-sequiturs in the cadence of a joke is Mulaney at his stand-up deconstructionist best.
Everybody’s Live is John Mulaney’s prankish comic imagination given a budget and free rein. Sometime guest and Saturday Night Live pal Bill Hader has repeatedly called Mulaney the funniest human being on the planet, and he should know. But even in their shared reminiscences of their time pitching sketches, part of the fun is their memories of some of Mulaney’s ideas bombing hard, the singular premises that had Mulaney and Hader in stitches in their office crashing with a thunderous thud in wider company.
Enjoying Everybody’s Live is enjoying the fact that Mulaney’s ideas are going to play out, no matter what. Mulaney’s the boss, and if we can’t follow him down every twisting, strange little lane, then he’s going to stride on happily without us.
The show’s season finale streams on Netflix next Wednesday May 28th at 10pm ET/7pm PT. Back with more then.
