The Late-Night Experiment That Puts Comedy First

by | Apr 8, 2025 | The Atlantic

On the first episode of Everybody’s Live With John Mulaney, Netflix’s new talk show, the comedian gathered a panel of 11 actors who have played Willy Loman, the tragic protagonist of the classic play Death of a Salesman. He lobbed queries at the group, which included recognizable stars (among them Christopher Lloyd) and fresh-faced students, asking them to answer in character—but not about their performances or the play itself. Instead, the host asked such questions as “How much screen time should an adolescent get?” and “Are movies too violent?”

This meeting of the Willy Lomans was a strange, charming, and original bit , the kind of thing that seemed like it could only have sprung from Mulaney’s mind; he’s long delighted in giving old-school American entertainment a modern tweak. It was a fantastically irrelevant piece of comedy that also let the comedian react to contemporary issues in his own specific manner: by gleefully summoning avatars of the broken American working man and using them to expose the ridiculous way we live now. This type of self-assured humor is core to Mulaney’s comedic sensibility—and a large part of what’s made his late-night experiment so fascinating.

Mulaney may very well roll his eyes at that analysis, and he’d probably be right to do so. The bulk of Everybody’s Live is clearly designed for the comedian’s amusement. The hour-long program, which airs Wednesdays and is Netflix’s first foray into weekly live programming, builds upon the six-episode series he did for the streamer in 2024, called Everybody’s in L.A. The ornery character actor Richard Kind is his announcer, barking non sequiturs from behind a podium. Each episode has a conversation topic with no particular connection to the week at hand, like lending people money or funeral planning; each one is just a subject of interest to Mulaney. His guests are a mix of celebrities and experts, yet the celebs make no effort to plug whatever current projects they may have. And Mulaney takes calls from viewers live on air, though if the person on the other end of the line rambles for too long, he will bark at them to hurry up.

In constructing this loopy hangout session, Mulaney is taking the standard talk-show format and languidly injecting it with some disorder. The audience never knows what might happen, but there’s also little chance of something truly maniacal going on. Mostly, the host is happy to chitchat, with pals and strangers alike. He has shown that he is as much an acolyte of the storied genre as he is an eager dismantler of it: When he emerged as one of the leading stand-up comedians of his generation, Mulaney already had more than a little Johnny Carson to him. Like the late talk-show veteran, he’s a reedy-voiced midwesterner with a face every mother could love. Mulaney’s schtick, however, carries a salty edge. It wasn’t too hard, while watching him perform onstage, to imagine the comedian ending up somewhere like The Tonight Show, delivering zingers from behind a desk.

But late night has become a rapidly decaying format, as broadcast television—where it primarily lives—slouches toward extinction. CBS just canceled After Midnight, the variety program hosted by the stand-up comic Taylor Tomlinson, which airs after Stephen Colbert’s Late Show; the network has no plans to replace the series or fill its time slot. When Conan O’Brien retired from hosting Conan on TBS, the cable channel began airing sitcom reruns in its stead. The Tonight Show, hosted by Jimmy Fallon, is still a TV institution; meanwhile, its excellent sister show Late Night With Seth Meyers, has been shedding budget, losing the house band last year. ABC will seemingly retain Jimmy Kimmel as long as he wants to keep doing Jimmy Kimmel Live—it’s currently in its 23rd season—yet his deal expires this year, and he’s yet to sign a new one. Shows from other, newer entrants in the late-night field, like the comedy duo Desus and Mero and the Daily Show fixture Samantha Bee, also ended prematurely.

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Mulaney has many advantages at Netflix that his conventional-television peers don’t, however. He doesn’t have to worry as much about ratings; he does only one show a week, with just 12 episodes currently planned, and there’s more room to break from the status quo on a streaming service that has sought to upset traditional media’s apple carts. At the same time, Everybody’s Live harkens back to a chattier, looser era—like The Merv Griffin Show, where interviews could run half an hour or longer, or Tom Snyder’s The Tomorrow Show, a newsier hour of talk that aired after Carson’s The Tonight Show for eight years. Focusing the conversation on a particular subject reminds me of Bill Maher’s shows Politically Incorrect and Real Time, though Maher tackles more topical material; taking live calls reminds me of the stand-up comic Chris Gethard’s truly riotous The Chris Gethard Show , which is still maybe the most electrifying attempt to remake the late-night genre of the past decade.

The resulting balance of serious and silly is perfectly amusing for a Mulaney fan like myself. Others might find the pithy gags a touch indulgent: Mulaney spends time fumbling around with a delivery robot and tossing beverages to his befuddled guests. The variety of pretaped sketches, including the Willy Lomans bit, may also fit into this category. But the pointlessness, as O’Brien emphasized in his conversation with Mulaney on his podcast last week, is part of the point. Rather than adopt the typical structure of a late-night show—celebrities telling cheeky, canned stories boiled down to 10 minutes or less—the host embraces weird, sometimes confusing antics.

O’Brien, one of Mulaney’s most apparent influences, articulated the appeal of this approach in their conversation: “We live in this era where I think people got intoxicated at some point with comedy having a point, and comedy meaning something, and comedy driving the conversation,” O’Brien said, referring to Mulaney’s absurdist spin on Death of a Salesman. “I think I just love when there’s a really funny idea that’s very creative.” An idiosyncratic sketch like that one, he added, “has a power that’s hard to understand, but it’s there.”

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The “funny first” sensibility motivated O’Brien during his many years as a late-night television host. To him, Mulaney, and their ilk, it’s much more important for comedy to be purely, anarchically funny, rather than speaking directly to “the moment.” O’Brien was also being a little coy: His own material can still speak to current events, even if he never trolls for “clapter ,” a term Meyers coined to describe the reaction of an audience demonstrating its approval instead of laughing spontaneously. O’Brien still has fun with societal foibles, just in a less direct fashion than some of his contemporaries. Mulaney’s approach to social commentary on his show is even more subtle; sometimes, concentrating a sketch on a character like Willy Loman is enough.

Mulaney’s comedic priorities have thus far kept Everybody’s Live focused—or as focused as such a program can be. Take a recent episode about cruises, which featured Ben Stiller, Quinta Brunson, and Mulaney’s frequent comedy partner Nick Kroll, along with a befuddled industry expert named Anne Kalosh. Kalosh sat chuckling as other panelists confessed they’d never been on a cruise and had no real interest in them, while Mulaney rolled with that irony chipperly. And when one caller’s story about life on a boat went on too long, Mulaney hung up on him. “It’s become a yarn, and we don’t have time for yarn,” he explained to his guests. “It’s a little rude, but also, it’s rude to waste the whole globe’s time.” He might be here to hang out, yet he’s still putting on a show.

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