Everybody's Flawed

John Mulaney's messy, experimental talk show, and second acts in American life.

(Netflix)

People have a lot of feelings about John Mulaney. Ask a comedy fan of just the right age and temperament about John Mulaney, and you will likely bear witness to a complicated series of overlapping, contradictory emotions.

They love John Mulaney. He is, for many comedy fanatics, the platonic ideal of a stand-up comedian: exorbitantly gifted, wildly inventive, a brilliant writer and performer. He was also, for a very long time, a living rejoinder to the many, many comedians whose idea of being daring is to tell another rape joke or anti-trans joke—no no no, folks, this one is really shocking and transgressive.

They also hate John Mulaney. Mulaney was a comedian who sold them a faulty bill of goods. Dressed in a suit and tie, all gawky, elbows-out energy, Mulaney looked like a 1950s throwback, Shelley Berman for the age of TikTok. Mulaney was a quintessential Wife Guy who reaped comedy from his seemingly idyllic personal life. When Mulaney not only revealed that he was leaving his wife and having a baby with the actress Olivia Munn, but also that he was checking into rehab for drug addiction, people felt disappointed. They felt confused, as if their favorite comedian had turned into a mirage, or perhaps never existed in the first place. This is the curse of Midwestern niceness, a nearly impossible standard to maintain throughout one’s entire life.

Some of the sincere distress Mulaney’s fans have felt in the years since stems from the gap between who Mulaney appeared to be and who he was. Much like Louis C.K., another beloved comedian whose rise and fall left a tornado of bruised feelings behind him (though, it must be noted, a trail of non-consenting victims), Mulaney had been read in one particularly flattering light by audiences who were flummoxed and disappointed when he turned out to be a more complex figure in actuality.

It is perhaps time to introduce the term “parasocial.” Parasocial relationships—the imagined connection between a famous figure and their audience— are part of the backbone of 21^st century culture, and few public figures of note have benefited more, and then taken more dings, from his parasocial relationship with his fans than John Mulaney. In fact, the Fall of Mulaney discourse largely introduced the term to a wider audience. Mulaney was a comedian that fans treated like a friend, and when he turned out to be someone other than his image as the gee-whiz wizard of the gift of gab, those same fans responded like there had been a death in the family.

John Mulaney is not and has never been a monster. He is just a garden-variety disappointing man who revealed himself to be a knottier and more flawed figure than his public image might have indicated. Some of my students at NYU have thrown in the towel on Mulaney 2.0, finding him too distressing to engage with, and I fully understand that.

We want to love the celebrities we love. We want to embrace them in their totality. We want them to be gifted performers. We want them to be funny and charming. We want them to be polite. We want them to be kind to strangers. We want them to have just the right politics. We want them to love their families and care for their children and be faithful to their partners. And guess what? Celebrities cannot live up to those expectations, because very few of us can. Our ongoing celebrity fixation sends us to the figures we love for sustenance of all kinds—emotional, spiritual, political, and otherwise—that they are often ill-equipped to provide.

I wound up sitting on my initial impulse to write about Everybody’s Live, Mulaney’s live talk show on Netflix, for some time because I couldn’t quite figure out how I felt about it. Parts of its second season, like Mulaney’s stellar opening monologues and some of the filmed sketches, including the one with Terminator 2 stuntmen discussing their favorite stunts from the movie, were indelible. Other segments, like the discussions where Mulaney invited guests to join him to talk about, say, whether dinosaurs had been put together improperly, or what the deal was with Real ID, were harder to parse. Why was legal scholar Neal Katyal sitting next to Wanda Sykes and Stavros Halkias? Why was Joan Baez talking about the March on Washington while onstage with Fred Armisen?

In its couch segments, the show deliberately avoids settling into a comfortable conversational groove, because each time it almost does, suddenly Sean Penn is coming out onstage, smoking a cigarette. Everybody’s Live is a mess, and Mulaney seems to revel in the chaos. Mulaney takes live calls during the show! Sometimes the calls are from children or people who say they have not slept for three days!

The thing is, Everybody’s Live is a perfect encapsulation of Mulaney 2.0. It is unpolished, deliberately ragged, a first draft presented as a finished product. Everybody’s Live could be described as self-indulgent, but I think it comes off more as experimental, less in the sense of being avant-garde (although it approaches that sensation occasionally) than in bearing witness to a series of experiments cobbled together by Mulaney and the show’s head writers Anna Drezen and Fran Gillespie.

It is Mulaney doing an entire show blindfolded for no particular reason, or promising to fight three 14-year-old boys simultaneously, or putting together an inch-by-inch assortment of men of different heights from 5 feet to 7 feet to form a living diorama as part of Mulaney’s absurdist “Know Your H” public-health campaign. It is Mulaney’s sidekick Richard Kind mocking Bill Belichick, complete with the bossy, much younger girlfriend who controls his public appearances. It is Mulaney promising that Bone Thugs-N-Harmony will perform on the show, then feeling chagrined when they do not show up, or having ‘90s rapper Twista demonstrate his new interest in ventriloquism. (Bone Thugs show up in the finale, wrapping up the season by telling all of us that we’ll see them at the crossroads.)

Television is often excellent and almost always safe. Watch any five minutes of any series—or late-night show—and you can generally guess what will follow. But Everybody’s Live is like a television version of Jay DeFeo’s famous painting “The Rose,” in which the artist coated layer after layer of paint onto a single canvas until the finished product had to be lifted out of her apartment with a crane. Why have one guest when you can have five? Why not have Steve Guttenberg show up in his pajamas to talk about his sleep routine? This is not 60 minutes of highly polished material, but Mulaney is preternaturally good at swinging at every curveball. Discussing Guttenberg’s sleep apnea, he wonders if maybe it’s a sign the Three Men and a Baby star should just be dead: “If you had a phone you couldn’t charge anymore…”

Two things can be true at once. Late-night TV is often very high-quality. Late-night TV is also often a bit stilted, another iteration of a painfully familiar format. Everybody’s Live is an attempt to explode our expectations by deliberately delivering a disjointed final product. Everybody’s Live is not meant to be smooth, and it isn’t always even meant to be good. Echoing predecessors like David Letterman and Conan O’Brien (both guests this season), Mulaney never appears happier than he is when the show completely derails with a bad caller, awkward interaction between guests, or a production mishap.

Everybody’s Live channels post-rehab, post-divorce Mulaney. It is not shiny and well-pressed. It is flawed and disjointed. It is not always intent on inviting us in. Sometimes it prefers to keep us outside, chuckling at our discomfort. As we’ve witnessed with comedians like Louis C.K. and Dave Chappelle, sometimes the first inclination of a comedian faced with criticism or career fallout from misconduct is to embrace the anti-woke right and drape themselves in the mantle of purported free speech.

Mulaney has, to his credit, not chosen to do that. While some of the material of Everybody’s Live—governmental overreach, scientific corruption— dances close to “just asking questions”-style podcast-bro material, Mulaney, thankfully, is not here to tell us he is a victim, or that he is misunderstood. He is here to show up on our screens, twelve times a year, live from Los Angeles at 7:02 PM Pacific time, not a hero, not a profile in courage, just a funny guy dancing on a narrow ledge, and wondering whether we might enjoy, say, watching eleven actors in character as Death of a Salesman’s Willy Loman answering questions about childhood obesity and screen time.

“He’s not the finest character that ever lived,” someone says of Willy Loman in Arthur Miller’s play. “Attention, attention must finally be paid to such a person.”

What do you think of John Mulaney and Everybody’s Live? Let us know in the comments!