Borrelli: John Mulaney holds Netflix hostage: Week 6

About a year ago, Chicago comedian John Mulaney did a talk show on Netflix that didn’t make a whole lot of sense, albeit by design, with great joy. It was a must-see meander of stray ideas, dead spots and rough invention. A year later, Mulaney has brought back that same dillydad with almost the same title — “John Mulaney Presents: Everybody’s in LA” is now “Everybody’s Live with John Mulaney” — but otherwise, it’s the same show, with the same possibilities, awkwardness and puzzle: Why would Netflix throw money at this thing? We’re six episodes in, with three more to go, and no closer to an answer.

And yet that in itself, that willingness to wander off a path of 21st century expectations, on a major streaming network driven by clicks and algorithms, is where freshness lies.

Mulaney, you can just tell, wishes he had been working in those languid, mold-breaking days of the 1970s. “The freedom land of the ‘70s,” as Lana Del Rey once sang. You can tell because, unlike whatever topical tensions or politics most late-night talk shows derive their purpose, the purpose of “Everybody’s Live” (as with “Everybody’s in LA”) appears to be Mulaney’s understanding that he can’t really justify doing this show at all.

Not in 2025.

Last year, during its trial run, he started out asking the studio audience: “Why even do this show? I don’t know, but it gives me something to do and structure is key for me.” On the first episode of this new revamp, he explained it as “my live, jazz-like unpredictable talk show — I can’t do coke or Adderall anymore, so now I’m making it your problem.”

David Letterman, decades ago, made a running joke out of his deep hatred of the corporate overlords at NBC. Mulaney, in a similar vein, seems to be either forever mocking Netflix for this folly or still trying to sell the premise of the show, even as the network pours in however many millions already committed. I can’t quite decide if this makes for the kind of subversive hand-biting that Letterman once dared. I can’t even decide yet if this is great TV. But it often feels delightfully, fascinatingly out of step. It plays like a Chicago hustle — it knows it’s on borrowed time. Letterman may be the obvious precedent but Mulaney’s delivery is less snide than lightly panicked, as if some Netflix thugs have their hands on a switch off-camera, eager to cut to black.

Mulaney hides nothing, his unease, his squirm, his annoyance, his deathly smile that seems to tell his writers: “See, I told you it wouldn’t work, and it didn’t.” Like Letterman, he tosses little quips to the off-camera producers, revealing just how roughly managed professional entertainment can actually get. During the first new episode, he said: “We’ve been working on this show all day. Some crew got here as early as 9 a.m.” On the second episode, after Mulaney hung up on a rambling phone call from a viewer, Nick Kroll, Mulaney’s frequent comedy partner, turned to Mulaney earnestly and asked if it’s stressful for Mulaney to listen to a caller go on endlessly without any clear direction.

Absolutely, Mulaney muttered: “Because he might be getting somewhere great.”

Intentionally or not, what I like about “Everybody’s Live with John Mulaney” is how it forces you to ask a question nearly every creative medium has faced: What is the point of this? Does creativity need a purpose? Can an artist’s sensibility be its own attraction? That, in a way, is another description of stand-up comedy, and Mulaney is wise to start each episode with a taste of his day job, then ease the rest into that same ranginess. Still, during an episode last spring, comedian George Wallace said if “Seinfeld” was a show about nothing, Mulaney’s show really is nothing. He wasn’t being mean. He was confused. Mulaney looked hurt. He has a vision, even if he doesn’t seem certain of it. It resembles an old episode of Dick Cavett’s show and it plays like one of those online montages of the “Saturday Night Live” cast losing focus and cracking up.

Rockiness can be its own asset.

Yet after the first episode last month, NPR asked: “What exactly is this show trying to achieve?” After I watched the other night, I surfed across the late-night talk landscape: Jimmy Fallon was watching card tricks, Stephen Colbert was telling Trump jokes, Jimmy Kimmel was listening to actresses promote movies and TV shows. What were those hosts trying to achieve? Mulaney was wondering if Anne Frank would be upset if she knew millions of teenage boys get to read her diary every day. Then he was talking to a funeral home worker. Then he asked a crew member to speak, just because he sounds like Kieran Culkin. The obvious way to read this is as a parody of a talk show, but I don’t think so. Letterman, a true believer in Johnny Carson, didn’t really parody talk shows either. He was himself, and he was not the kind of person who gets a TV talk show. If Mulaney’s taken a cue from Letterman, it’s that he’s also being himself, and that self is too curious, and too caustic, to sit still, to someone talk about a movie no one will see.

Why bother reinventing the talk show when TikTok and YouTube alone — which give you celebrities eating spicy chicken wings, and hosts openly flirting with guests — did that already?

The real spiritual inspiration here seems to be public access TV — or rather, the oddly compelling ineptness of a show that only loosely grasps the conventions of television. This also means, as the long talk show couch on the show grows more and more crowded — there are too many guests per show — it’s never the dinner party you expect.

If there’s an organizing principle, Mulaney explained it nicely: “Netflix has given me a hour to introduce my fans to the baby boomer culture that has made me the unsettled weirdo that I am today.” Last spring, that meant director John Carpenter predicting Mexico will retake California; a video of terrible Los Angeles parkers giving advice to new high school graduates; and mental health professionals diagnosing the mental health issues of comedians. This spring, it’s been deft nods to Brian De Palma movies; old Sonic Youth songs; great little video snapshots of Los Angelenos, including a rabbi who would much rather discuss the Gene Hackman thriller “Crimson Tide” than his job.

Why put together a focus group composed of actors who have played Willy Loman in “Death of a Salesman” — from students to famous names like Christopher Lloyd — and ask them if they carried anything in their suitcases while onstage? Because Mulaney is genuinely curious, and, again, the result is a compelling spectacle. Mulaney asks them to perform, at the same time, the “Promises were made” speech. It’s chaos. “Thank you, Willies,” Mulaney says when they’re done. “You’re all worth more living than dead.”

I feel the same way about “Everybody’s Live with John Mulaney.”

Streaming 10 p.m. ET Wednesdays on Netflix.