In one of his many (often savage) appearances on late-night shows, comedian Martin Short told host Jimmy Fallon, “Let me just say, there is no one better than you at milking a living off a dying medium.” For a while now, the beloved genre of American late-night television has been perceived to be decline. Shows such as the recent After Midnight and The Late Late Show With James Corden have been cancelled, The Tonight Show shrunk from five nights to four and ratings are reportedly down across the board.
But that just doesn’t stop men – it’s usually men – from frantically trying to milk a living from the great TV tradition of “talking to people on a couch at night”. Comedian John Mulaney is the most recent to step up, for new Netflix venture Everybody’s Live With John Mulaney, which is an offshoot of last year’s Everybody’s in LA. It’s far stranger than your grandpa’s late-night talk show. But is it enough to save the “dying medium”?
Everybody’s Live is an experimental format that mimics the idea of late-night TV on a streaming service by filming and streaming live every Wednesday night over a 12-episode season. An edited version of the show is accessible after the livestream. But the content is far more experimental than the delivery mechanism. Mulaney has created a very strange, often chaotic, absurdist masterpiece that blends the format of the traditional late-night talk show with the tone of an alt-comedy sketch show.
Chelsea Peretti, Bill Hader, Johnny Knoxville at Everybody’s Live with John Mulaney.Credit: Ryan West/Netflix
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There’s the staple of the genre, celebrity guests, of which Mulaney has assembled an impressive collection so far, with Michael Keaton, Joan Baez, Henry Winkler and Wanda Sykes. There’s a pretty traditional set including a couch and show announcer, actor and comedian Richard Kind. But these talk show tropes are treated to a kind of fun-house mirror sensibility. Mixed in with the real guests, comedians also portray other characters, such as Saturday Night Live alumni Aidy Bryant playing rapper Jelly Roll and Tony Award winner André De Shields singing a song as “Chesterton Cheadle”, a man who the Cheetos cat was supposedly based upon.
In episode five, Kind spends the entire show doing a bit where he was hit on the head by a KISS album and now thinks he is Gene Simmons, complete with a bad wig. It’s reminiscent of classic alt-comedy podcast Comedy Bang Bang, with much of the joy coming from real celebrities being forced to navigate an increasingly absurd line between performance and actual questions.
Everybody’s Live also gleefully indulges in a range of bits, such as a quest to find men ranging from five to seven feet so they can be “stood in a line together”, people “calling in to the studio” and pre-recorded sketches including a long and confrontational interview with Michael Jackson’s chimp, Bubbles.
Every episode is also given a theme: lending people money, cruises, funeral planning, and getting fired to name a few. It not only directs the conversations for the celebrity guests, but also leads to having “real people” on as guests, such as an HR representative who runs the panel through the process of how to fire people. It’s actually more reminiscent of breakfast radio than it is late-night TV – except actual funny people are involved and there are no ads for a local tile company.
When it works, it’s very good. However, there are some more awkward episodes. Cruise ships, for instance, just didn’t seem to land as a particularly interesting topic, whereas everybody had good stories about getting fired. It’s also about finding the right people.
On the getting fired episode, the guests were Chelsea Peretti, Bill Hader and Jackass′ Johnny Knoxville, who could all find comedy gold in any subject. It helps when Mulaney is friends with his guests, too.
Richard Kind on Everybody’s Live with John Mulaney.Credit: Ryan West/Netflix
It all has a frantic, somewhat cobbled together feeling that’s incongruous to the amount of money that’s clearly being spent on the show – and nobody seems more joyful about the chaos than Mulaney. “This is what it’s gonna be like the entire time,” he whispers to his friend Bill Hader. “I have a whole new vibe, it’s very different”.
Known for his time as a writer on SNL and his award-winning stand-up, Mulaney has the range of skills a late-night host requires. His opening monologues are perfectly delivered and his time on SNL means he’s not only accomplished at creating absurd characters, he also knows how to engage with them on live television.
He’s also a regular guest on talk shows, and it’s clear while he’s subverting the genre, he does still love the format and its legacy.
So hallowed is the tradition of the late-night format in the US that before now, there seemed to be an unwillingness to update the format in any meaningful way. From The Break with Michelle Wolf to The Joel McHale Show with Joel McHale, Netflix has been trying to bring the formula to streaming but mostly sticking to the classic structure – and cancelling them when they don’t pan out.
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Even here, Network 10 has tried to break the late-night curse that’s existed on our screens since the demise of Rove Live with Sam Pang Tonight, a slightly localised imitation of American late-night TV, complete with a generic cityscape set (but without the Hollywood guests). It’s not a carbon copy – there are some fun Australian elements and unique segments, but it’s still an earnest take on the traditional format.
Everybody’s Live seems to poke fun at that reverence for late-night talk shows, burning down the tropes of the genre with glee. It might be a winning strategy, a way to “save” the format – but it feels less deliberate than that. Maybe it’s just a way to genuinely have fun in a beloved style of show, for as long as they’re allowed to get away with it.
