Everybody’s in LA, John Mulaney’s six-part Netflix live talk show, loosely about Los Angeles, is a lesson in the promise and peril of taking artistic risks. Created to coincide with the “Netflix Is a Joke” humor festival, the show teased its ad hoc premise with winking promos depicting awkward vox pops with real Angelenos, promises of talent “equal to, but not necessarily, Jerry Seinfeld, Chris Rock, and David Letterman,” and framing that warned viewers that the show will kind of, well, make things up as it goes. Fair play, and kudos for the moxie — though some viewers will enjoy this thrown-together meal even as others wish Mulaney would discard freestyle cooking and return to the comic equivalent of a Julia Child recipe. 

Mulaney, one of America’s most successful stand-up comics and a generally deft showman, has indicated that the series was born from a desire to take advantage of the fact that so many comedians would be in town at the same time. Although Everybody’s in LA has its eccentric charms, the whole edifice leans on an assumption — putting funny people together in a room inevitably leads to an entertaining outcome — that is at times tested. Jerry Seinfeld’s Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee may be the best-known example of this conceit, though so many other shows, podcasts, and the like have pursued it, and with such uneven results, that by 2022 the film Bodies Bodies Bodies depicted someone sighing as another character pitches her a podcast about “hanging out with your smartest and funniest friend.”