John Mulaney is blowing up the late-night TV formula, 1 bonkers episode at a time

Yahoo

02-05-2025

There's always been something beautiful about late-night television. For decades, the genre has used humor to pierce right to the heart of the issues that have captured the nation's attention. Hosts like Johnny Carson, David Letterman and Stephen Colbert have built their legacies tucking America into bed with some news, jokes and, often, a spoonful of catharsis.
On Wednesday night, John Mulaney proudly carried on that tradition by convening a panel of guests to answer a question that viewers surely wanted answered: Should he get hip replacement surgery, or should he just stick with physical therapy?
Wait, what?
Everybody's Live With John Mulaney, the comedian's new-ish live Netflix series, throws one of the cardinal rules of the genre out the window. Historically, most, if not all, late-night shows have tied themselves to current events. Hosts like Seth Meyers and Jimmy Kimmel monologue about the news before interviewing a few timely guests. Even John Oliver, whose HBO show Last Week Tonight dives deep into a single topic each week, usually sets aside a few minutes to discuss a timely news item.
But Mulaney is different. He'd rather answer questions like 'Should I Lend People Money?' 'What Kind of Funeral Should I Have?' or 'Are Dinosaurs Put Together Correctly?' These episode titles capture the show's deliberately nonsensical approach and echo the cheerful, inoffensive tone of Mulaney's stand-up specials.
Baffling as Mulaney's approach to late night might be, Everybody's Live feels like the most brilliant entry the genre has seen in years. As ramshackle as the show's production appears, it could overcome fundamental industry shifts that more established shows have struggled to address.
Late night wasn't always entirely topical, but topical coverage has reigned supreme. Bill Carter, who's written two books on late night and is editor at large for LateNighter, traces the evolution back to Jack Paar, the second host of The Tonight Show, after Steve Allen. While Allen's version felt like a broad variety show with talk and comedy components, Paar's iteration began in 1957 and leaned more heavily into social issues. For instance, Paar booked an interview with John F. Kennedy before he was elected president.
But it was Johnny Carson who pushed the genre toward topicality.
'His monologue became a big focus point of what you tuned in for,' Carter tells Yahoo Entertainment. 'You tuned in to see him do jokes. And if you're going to create [an] original comedy monologue five nights a week, you're pretty much going to have to read the newspapers for your ideas.'
David Letterman took a detour from topicality on his version of Late Night, which aired after Carson's Tonight Show, calling his introduction 'opening remarks.' After a few good jokes, he'd move on to his real passion — conceptual comedy. Meanwhile, Carter says, Carson's competitor Dick Cavett leaned into cultural movers and shakers whom Carson never would have touched, like John Lennon and Yoko Ono.
'They were all looking for niches at that point, because you couldn't take Carson on, head on, in his bailiwick, which was commentary on what was happening in the country,' Carter says. But when Letterman moved to CBS in 1993 after Jay Leno won the coveted Tonight Show hosting gig, he expanded his monologue — and Leno himself went all-in on topical monologue jokes.
Ironically, monologues are rarely what gets remembered in any of these series. It's the creative bits that fans return to years later, because Carter explains, 'There's nothing more ephemeral than a daily monologue joke. The next week, it's probably irrelevant.'
The Daily Show reinvented the formula as a faux newscast and became a main news source for much of its audience — especially after Jon Stewart took the reins in 1999. Then, in 2005, former Daily Show correspondent Stephen Colbert began a virtuosic, nine-year sketch, spoofing Bill O'Reilly and his ilk with The Colbert Report. Both of these Comedy Central shows brought news to the center of late night in a fresh way.
For many reasons, Everybody's Live would not have made much sense during the early to mid-2000s, when Stewart and Colbert changed the game. The Dubya era was fertile ground for anyone who wanted to pierce deep into political hypocrisy, and retrospectively, the rise of Stewart and Colbert primed late night for the political onslaught to come. In the mid-2010s, these shows saw a change of the guard, with titans like Stewart and Letterman stepping down while hosts like Fallon, Colbert and Meyers stepped into new roles at Tonight, Late Show and Late Night. At the same time, Oliver and former Daily Show correspondent Samantha Bee launched their own late-night shows — just in time for the political-news tsunami of the first Trump administration.
Mulaney himself coined the best analogy to describe that time: There was a horse loose in a hospital.
Every new development felt unprecedented. It became late-night catnip — especially because, as Carter recalls, Trump had been a popular late-night guest for years, as a 'big, larger-than-life kind of buffoonish character' who hosts could make fun of and send on his way.
Perhaps because of this, late night never took Trump's 2016 presidential run too seriously. So when he won, Alison Dagnes, professor and chair of the political science department at Shippensburg University, believes they all course-corrected by going all in. As headline after headline put it, they tried to 'eviscerate' his every move.
Audiences' appetite for this kind of coverage shifted the ratings battle between Jimmy Fallon and Colbert. Although Colbert had initially struggled with Late Show (enough so that rumors began swirling that Late Late Show host James Corden could replace him), the Trump years laid the groundwork for him to shine, overtaking Fallon in viewership.
Now, Trump's second term feels markedly different.
Dagnes posits that three things happened between Trump's terms. First, we moved away from appointment TV. Second, Americans became exhausted and scared. And third, our idea of humor shifted.
People don't watch linear TV the way they used to. Many people consume late night through YouTube clips after the full episodes have aired, which poses new challenges for the business.
'Back in the old days, when Jay Leno wanted one more audience member, he was pulling in, I don't know, like 10 million people a night,' Dagnes says. 'That's a lot, right? And even though Joe Rogan is the number one podcast in the world, and his interview with Donald Trump got 50 million views on YouTube, in truth, these podcasts, even in the top 10, they're not getting 10 million views.'
Audience size has given way to audience capture. Rather than go for the largest audience possible, Dagnes says, the goal now is to court a loyal audience that will actually stick around.
Through the years, Mulaney has proven very good at that. His brand of comedy is unmistakable — staunchly apolitical, rife with absurd anecdotes and delivered with a distinct cadence. It's what's kept viewers flocking back to his stand-up specials, and it's likely a big part of why Netflix wanted Everybody's Live in the first place. Even better, Mulaney cut his teeth as a writer on SNL, which means he has the technical skill to deliver week after week.
The other two late night game-changers Dagnes pointed out also serve Mulaney well.
'Trump 2.0 feels existentially… more exhausting, and also very threatening,' she says. 'There's just less of an appetite now for the funny of it when it feels like, 'OK, wait a minute. What do you mean we're taking Americans to El Salvador?''
But beyond making it difficult for Americans to 'find the funny' in daily developments, Dagnes posits that audiences are also more polarized than ever, further limiting the reach any politically partisan late-night host can hope to capture.
No one would ever expect Mulaney to talk about politics. His 'horse loose in a hospital' bit managed to avoid ever mentioning Trump by name. 'His style is not to be political,' Dagnes explains. 'And Netflix's style is not to take a side. They are the Jay Leno on steroids — instead of one more viewer, they want 100 million more viewers.'
Netflix didn't immediately respond to Yahoo Entertainment's request for comment.
The strange escapism of Everybody's Live is a rare gift. But its genius goes way deeper than its political avoidance. The show feels like a true callback to broadcast — a zany variety hour that plops high-caliber celebrities like Henry Winkler, Quinta Brunson and Marc Maron next to anesthesiologists and funeral directors to see what happens when they take phone calls from the public.
As extemporaneous as the show might be, its cobbled-together vibe is more curated than it seems. Two of Mulaney's guests from this season — Jessica Roy, personal finance columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, and licensed funeral director and embalmer Raymundo Perez-Plascencia — told Yahoo that, yes, the show's production process does include rehearsals.
'They spelled out for me exactly how the day was going to go,' says Roy, who appeared in Episode 1. That said, the calls are absolutely live and unscripted.
When asked if it was hard to get a word in edgewise with the A-listers, Roy says she actually worried she'd spoken too much. When only Michael Keaton had a story to tell about Jack Nicholson's money-lending habits, Roy filled in the gaps.
'I thought, 'People are here to like, watch Fred Armisen and Joan Baez and Michael Keaton. And instead they were listening to me be like, 'You should think about going back to law school!'' she says.
Although Perez-Plascencia wasn't sure the show's producers were legit when they first reached out through Instagram DM — he thought, 'Somebody's either catfishing me or trying to make me their sugar daddy' — he also had no problem speaking up when his turn came.
'Everyone was just so down to earth,' he says of his Episode 3 experience. 'During the skit breaks, a lot of them were just talking as regular humans and just, 'Hey, so what do you do? Hey, we thought about this.' And just little things like that. It made everything feel like, hey, we're just a bunch of cool people and cool friends hanging out just talking. There happens to be cameras here. So I did appreciate that.'
As a journalist, Roy also recognizes the virtue of a show that tunes it all out. 'I think it's valuable for people to have sort of a refuge — a fun, interesting, late-night show that isn't, that isn't talking about the news,' she says. 'I get it. People don't want to hear about it 24/7.'
The sheer randomness of Everybody's Live makes the formula feel timeless. You could watch this week's episode about major surgery two weeks or even two years from now, and it would likely be just as funny. Not a single reference would feel out of place. Netflix has toyed with late night before, but Mulaney has finally figured out how to create a show that feels at home both within the genre and on the platform. The show is a raggedy collage of old influences, snack robots, nonsensical sketches and Richard Kind, and somehow, it all works.
Even the clipboard Mulaney pretends to read from at the start of every episode reminds Carter of an old late-night trope — the legal pad that Steve Allen used to hold on the very first version of The Tonight Show. 'Because [Allen and his writers] didn't know what the formula was, right? They were inventing it; they didn't know what it was.'
Now, he says, 'John is sort of reinventing it on the fly.'