With Everybody’s Live, John Mulaney is shaking up what music on TV can be

Mannequin Pussy rocking out in front of a gothic church backdrop, Maggie Rogers and John Cale singing about sharks and jail time, Cypress Hill living out a Simpsons joke and performing with the London Symphony Orchestra. These are just some of the musical highlights of Everybody’s Live, the John Mulaney chat show breathing new life into the stale late night landscape.

There is an air of chaos to Mulaney’s fever dream of a late night show, which broadcasts weekly live on Netflix. It’s ostensibly a discussion show with celebrity guests and an expert gathering to discuss a weekly theme and, later, take calls from the public. While Jimmy Fallon guffaws on The Tonight Show as his guests promote the latest Marvel blockbuster, Everybody’s Live has John Waters and comedian Stavros Halkias talking about squatters rights.

Some guests look perplexed. Others, including the excellent Quinta Brunson (subject “Are cruises worth it”), embrace the chaos. Ayo Edeberi described Mulaney in a recent episode as both “sober and a father” and “spiritually on crack,” accurately summing up the loose and unpredictable vibe of an average episode. Mulaney perhaps put it best himself when he joked “Not since Harry and Meghan has Netflix given more money to someone without a specific plan.”

That gag underplays what Everybody’s Live is doing, though. It’s not unplanned, just unrestrained. Nobody is allowed to go through the motions, including the live musical guests. In the latest episode Maggie Rogers and John Cale performed the latter’s 2024 song “Shark-Shark” together (they also chatted about dentistry on the couch). That’s not a duo many people would have paired together and yet the cross-generational Cale and Rogers found a space between his avant-garde tendencies and her pop melodies. Upon releasing the song in 2024 Cale said, “When youʼre feeling too much of the real world, the best diversion is something that puts a grin on your face.” They could make that the logline for Everybody’s Live.

Other grin-inducing performances have included Metz, the Toronto punk band that only split six months ago, reuniting and playing in a fake snow storm (it was a Christmas episode filmed in April) and the New Century Chamber Orchestra performing a Vivaldi piece Mulaney explained is his 3-year-old son’s favorite. Where many late night shows have become a pit stop on the promotional tour, Everybody’s Live feels more like a playground for music lovers desperate to show something new. Case in point, Kim Deal and Kim Gordon teamed up to perform their 1995 Sonic Youth collaboration “Little Trouble Girl” live for the first time.

Music bleeds its way into the humor of the show, too. Sketches including “What if Seinfeld was Phish” and “The making of a Charli xcx joke” help break up the chats. Charlie Wilson, meanwhile, sang “America the Beautiful” as part of a stunt where men of various heights lined up in a perfectly diagonal line. Another episode began with a long anecdote from Mulaney about his attempts at booking Bone Thugs-N-Harmony only for a scammer posing as their manager to attempt to shake him down for $75,000.

It’s not that the art of the late night performance is dead. Hardcore band Knocked Loose pushed genre boundaries on Jimmy Kimmel’s show last year while Doechii’s ornately-choreographed performance on The Late Show in December was one of the first showcases of her theatrical side. But talent bookers at shows like these have spoken about the music sections essentially acting as fodder for their YouTube channels as much as the TV broadcasts (with many essentially acting as a signal to viewers that the show is over).

While that has opened lanes for rising artists to get a turn in front of the cameras, it’s hard for the formula to avoid feeling stale after a while. Everybody’s Live is carving its musical niche by being eclectic and exclusive. Hopefully, that same refreshing spontaneity carries through into the rest of late night.