Everybody’s in LA—John Mulaney’s bonkers experiment of a late-night talk show for Netflix—was only ever meant to be six episodes long. But the comedian isn’t completely ruling out bringing the series, or something like it, back.
In a new interview with IndieWire, Mulaney explained that Netflix’s willingness to let him assume total creative control of the project was what initially attracted him to the opportunity.
“Netflix wanted a show every night, coinciding with the [Netflix Is a Joke] festival,” Mulaney said. “They didn’t know what they wanted. They brought it to me and said, ‘Would you want to produce this? And be some part of it?’ And it was like that: ‘We don’t know what this is. Do you want to do it?’ [It was] that open.”
Equally interesting to Mulaney was the project’s brevity. “I was intrigued by six live nights, the run of it, and the finite amount of time,” he said.
While audiences embraced the happy chaos that Mulaney created, what many people may not have realized was just how personal the project felt to the comedian.
“[Fan response to Everybody’s in LA] in particular felt really gratifying because most of the comedy I’ve done is actually about external topics and not about my own life or psyche or whatever; it was never about my personal life,” Mulaney explained. “To me, I mainly make fun of TV shows and random things I’ve seen. So this show being entirely external, in a way in the end becomes the most personal thing you can do.” (For the record, Mulaney swears that “I think more about earthquakes and ghosts than I do my own life.”)
As for whether he’d like to continue the series, or create another late-night show like it: while there’s nothing on the immediate horizon, Mulaney’s definitely not ruling it out.
“I used to have strong opinions: ‘I’ll only do this’ or ‘I’ll never do this.’ And ‘I don’t want to get pigeonholed like this,’” Mulaney revealed. “I’m very now into instinct and what’s happening in the moment. And that’s how this show came together. I really don’t have some strong principled take on doing it again. It was so fun, you know?”
To be continued.
