‘John Mulaney Presents: Everybody’s in LA’ Is a Winningly Shambolic Pop-Up Talk Show: TV Review

variety.com:

Alison Herman TV Critic Los Angeles is not the first city fans would associate with comedian John Mulaney. That would be Chicago, his hometown and the backdrop to innumerable childhood anecdotes in his stand-up act, or New York, where he broke out as a writer on “Saturday Night Live” and shot a special at Radio City Music Hall.

But LA is where Mulaney now lives; it’s also currently home to the second iteration of Netflix Is a Joke, a massive, weeklong comedy festival organized by the streaming service as a show of genre dominance. (Netflix stand-up head Robbie Praw used to run programming at Montreal’s vaunted Just for Laughs event and has essentially created a West Coast version.) And so we have “John Mulaney Presents: Everybody’s in LA,” a weeklong special event combining studio segments, pre-taped sketches and man-on-the-street interviews into a sort of pop-up talk show. “We’re only doing six episodes, so this show will never hit its groove,” Mulaney warned during the opening monologue, delivered from his temporary home base at Sunset Gower Studios.

True to his word, the broadcast — the latest of Netflix’s recent experiments with live programming — had some visible hiccups, including sound issues and a palpable rush through the final stretch to wrap the show around the hour mark.

But the awkwardness only added to the charm of an inherently contradictory undertaking: a hyper-local show about a sprawling patchwork of neighborhoods that’s also a global event with major superstars, an oxymoron neatly captured by wildlife advocate Tony Tucci sharing a couch with Jerry Seinfeld.