A guide to Hollywood’s biggest races

What was Everybody’s in LA? The simplest answer is “a limited-run live talk show hosted by John Mulaney that aired on Netflix earlier this spring.” Ask the unconventional production’s own guests, though, and you’d get a much more interesting array of answers. While appearing on the show, Jon Stewart called it “a Banksy.” Comedian Mae Martin went for a “David Lynch fever dream.” Mulaney himself has pegged it as “a diorama I built.”

But it’s Nikki Glaser, fresh off her triumph at the Netflix roast of Tom Brady, who may have said it best. “I love this show so much,” she told Mulaney on the series finale May 11. “It’s like an inside joke that only you are in on.”

How would the host himself describe the show now? “One of the greatest assignments you can get,” Mulaney tells Vanity Fair in the latest episode of our Little Gold Men podcast (listen below). The streamer approached Mulaney about filling six nights of air time during its comedy-focused Netflix Is a Joke Festival in May. “The question was not when or if, it was just what,” says the comedian. “Obviously they would have yanked it if it was a total disaster leading up to it, but the idea was six live nights.”

Everybody’s in LA wasn’t a disaster: It was a rough, occasionally transcendent experiment that gave the Emmy winner an opportunity to combine regular talk show stuff (stand-up, interviews with famous people) with bits that were decidedly weirder and more specific (like one involving children dressed as pint-sized versions of George Carlin and John Oliver, or a running gag that revolved around the robots that scuttle along the streets of Los Angeles delivering food and drinks). Below, Mulaney breaks down the show, from the famous faces who turned him down—including his good friend Bo Burnham—to a potential second installment (which could, theoretically, take place in a new city, but only if “everybody was there”).

Vanity Fair: How did you hit on the aesthetic of the show? It feels very intentional—the browns and the suits and the furniture.

John Mulaney: I knew I didn't want a shiny black floor. I didn't want anything chrome. I didn't want anything to look like late night or reality shows as they do now. So I thought, what is missing on all these shows? And it's patterned furniture.

And upholstery.

With deep chairs. As a guest on many shows, I noticed the chairs are always a little shallow and a little firm, so that you sit up straight. I thought it'd be much more fun to have high armchairs that are a little deep. But yeah, I wasn't going for an off-putting aesthetic or anything. The set was actually modeled after Johnny Carson's house in Malibu. A lot of brutalist gold things, plus grapes. Glass grapes are wonderful.

Everybody’s in LA is pretty freewheeling, but each episode is also self-contained. When did you land on the idea to have one topic per show?

Each episode is fairly self-contained. I mean, some nights we had almost competing themes. I remember at one point coming back from a piece of video we showed, and I said, “Welcome back to Sunglasses Night. The topic is ‘helicopters.’”

The idea of themed episodes, we kicked around early. It helped focus the type of expert or scientist [we’d invite]—we actually called all of them “coyotes,” because they were people you discover in Los Angeles. So everyone not a comedian on our corkboard was called a coyote.

In your first episode, you make a joke about how the show’s never going to really find its groove, since it’s only six episodes long. Knowing how the show turned out, do you think that was accurate?

A hundred percent accurate. We never found a groove. And I think that's a good thing. I don't say this in a contrarian way of, you know, “shows and projects that run well are not fun.” That's not the case at all. But there was something great in that. We had no time to learn anything as it was happening. Something would work really well, and we wouldn't have it the next night because we didn't plan for it. Anything that was a runner was planned as a runner weeks in advance. So had SAMO not been popular, I don't know what we would have done.

If you were going to start over and do the show again tomorrow, what would be the first thing you’d change about your approach?

On May 11th, I would have said to cut down certain pieces. However, in the weeks since then, I've heard so many favorable things about them. It was probably my favorite piece—we had this focus group of older punks from L. A. punk bands. The first cut was 28 minutes. At one point, [director] Lance Bangs and Fred [Armisen] and [writer] Alex Skordelis and I thought, like, “should we just get everyone a hotel room and make a documentary?” It was a little longer than most segments you see on a show like that. And people have loved it.

A lot of my instincts were rewarded. And that's both an exciting and a very dangerous thing.

You said on air that David Lynch turned down the show because he didn't understand it. Who else turned you down?

Werner Herzog said, “I have to be very careful about being around comedians.” It was a little cryptic, which I liked. David Lee Roth said no, just passed—no great story there. Bo Burnham is a good friend of mine, and I said, “do you want to come on? I never see you on these.” He goes, “yeah, I know—there's a reason for that.”

I said, “I'll have you on, and we'll call it Recluse Night. And it'll only be recluses who don't normally do TV.” And he found that pretty funny. I think I almost had him with that, but no—he's gotta be Bo, which I support.

So he’s saving himself for Jerrod Carmichael.

What do you mean?

Well, he’s on the Jerrod Carmichael reality show, right?

Maybe not, right? Isn't it fun to pretend we don't know it's him?

How did you plan the arc of the series—where you would start, and who would be on that first episode?

In a fun way, because it was only six nights, a lot of what we were working with was restrictions. I think that was the only night Seinfeld could do it because he had the Hollywood Bowl the night before. My goal for the first episode was Seinfeld and a coyote expert. I sort of said that as a north star, and then we actually ended up locking that in.

Seinfeld made headlines not long ago, talking about political correctness and its effect on comedy. I'm wondering if you have any feelings about that topic.

[Laughs] That topic is… such a topic. I have no opinions on it. I find it very boring.

Everybody’s in LA had a call-in element, with real people on the other end of the phone. To what extent were those calls screened before you heard them?

We had a wonderful producer named James Kim who had done a lot of NPR call-in stuff, and he spoke to everyone. The number was out there, so people started calling before we actually went live at 7 pm, so we could start to screen a little earlier. But then people would call up like Ben Mankiewicz from Turner Classic Movies, [and] a guy named Jim who turned out to be Jimmy Kimmel. James Austin Johnson called in as Bob Dylan. So someone had to go, Oh, it's really them, let's push them forward in the queue. And our executive producer Ashley Edens would get in my ear: “The mayor's on the phone, and we think it's really the mayor.”

So you really did learn live that Mayor Karen Bass had called into the show?

Yeah. That one, they didn't write like, “Bob D in Malibu.” They wrote, “It's Mayor Bass. Can you take it before 7:27? ‘Cause she had a hard out.”

Were you surprised that she was watching the show?

Yes. But as she started talking, I thought, “Oh, maybe someone on your team was watching.”

In our first episode, when I was talking about some of the flaws in Los Angeles, I said that there's no shade on the current mayor at all. I don't know how any person could look at the whole city and go, “I got this. I'm pretty sure I know how to run it.” I did find, over the course of six nights, a lot more community in the city than I thought.

Did you expect your hair to be such a frequent topic of conversation on the show?

No, ‘cause my hair's been this length for a little bit. But it's great with me, you know? Any topic's great.

Have you watched Everybody’s in LA since you taped it?

I actually did a panel in LA, and they were showing the “Earthquakes” episode with [David] Letterman and Luenell. I watched some of it when I got backstage, and I was really shocked how much we were able to pack into it.

Is that your favorite one? Is that your Emmy submission?

Well, we declared that that was the Emmy submission at the beginning of the show, so I have to be a man of my word and submit that one. We called our shot before it was done, just because it's funny to declare it ahead of time.

Except Earthquake, the comedian, is on the “Helicopters” episode.

Earthquake is on “Helicopters.” Again, availability.

Well, everybody was in LA, but everybody was booked.

That would have been a good subtitle for the show.

I'm sure doing this appealed to you in part because it was a limited run. But now that it’s over, do you think you’d want to do a longer run of a similar sort of show?

Sure, I'm open to anything. I also felt like there's something about the confines of this, the restrictions of this and the blank slate of this that lent itself to having a pretty fun, unique time. I guess the question would be, how do you keep that alive? So I have thought about it, but I have zero conclusions.

Do you think that if there were to be more episodes, you would want to go to a different city or just keep it in LA?

If everybody was there. And I'm not just trying to stay on title, but [the idea of the show] was that all these comedians who never get to see each other are all in this city at one time. And the city happens to be fathoms deep with weird shit.

Was there an L.A. topic you didn't get to that you wanted to do?

Water. We didn't even get to water! Do you know how much water everyone is using? That was a big thing for a while. How come it rains so much, and we still have a drought? Patton Oswalt used to have a joke that sometimes it rains and you're like, this will help the drought. And people in LA are like, “no, actually it makes it worse.” That was a question I should have asked Dr. Emily Lindsay from La Brea Tar Pits. By the way, it's not the La Brea Tar Pits—I was told after the show, it's La Brea Tar Pits. I wanted to know, is LA habitable without all the water jujitsu we do?

Is there anything you're hoping that people get out of the show besides just enjoying it?

I really wanted to put on something that people could have on while they leave the room. I was gonna say that at the top of the first show, and I forgot: You really can fold laundry during this. You won't have to rewind. It's not even reality fare, where things build on each other. Again, we had no time to build anything.

When someone called in on the show, you would end every conversation by asking, “What kind of car do you drive?” Where'd that question come from?

I was really psyched to see that some reviewer was like, “In such an automotive culture, there was nothing left but to ask what kind of car do you drive,” and made it seem like it was a lot more philosophical. I just thought it was a funny, random question. And as soon as I started asking people, I really enjoyed it. Safest mid-size SUVs is a topic I could talk about for a long time. [There were] a lot of Priuses.

Yeah, the Venn diagram of Prius owners and people who are going to watch this show and call in…

Yeah, it wasn’t even a Venn diagram. It’s a circle.