When John Mulaney’s sitcom Mulaney was canceled after only 13 poorly rated episodes, the comedian took it well. “I have a real respect for when the audience goes, ‘Nope.’ I really do. There is something very democratic and cool about it,” he told Vulture some months after the final episode aired in 2015. Ever the fair-minded gentleman, he added, “It’s a network-TV show. People don’t have some mandate to hear me out.” Indeed.
Mulaney the person, as you probably know, went on to success across mediums: on Broadway with Oh, Hello (and soon a Simon Rich play), in stand-up comedy with sold-out tours, on streaming with a Netflix variety hour called John Mulaney and the Sack Lunch Bunch—not to mention arguably the best episode of Documentary Now!, in which he plays a Sondheim-esque composer chain-smoking his way through an arduous cast recording. He’s hosted Saturday Night Live five times (soon to be six), and his most recent Netflix special, Baby J, is the best hour of material I’ve seen in years. People seemed to like Everybody’s in LA and loved his bit at the Oscars.
Mulaney the sitcom, however, faded into obscurity. And not like, “Hey, remember Covert Affairs?” obscurity. True obscurity. The only place I could find to watch it was on the Internet Archive, and even that has since vanished as of yesterday’s hack. It’s a weird footnote in an otherwise dazzling career that began at SNL and will probably end with him being declared President Of Comedy, begging the question: Is it actually possible that one of the funniest guys on the planet made something truly mid?
The premise is familiar: John Mulaney plays a stand-up comedian named John Mulaney who lives in New York City with his two best-friend roommates, Jane (Nasim Pedrad, forever in search of worthy material—please watch Chad) and Motif (Seaton Smith…yes, the name “Motif” is questionable). Across the hall lives his hippie neighbor Oscar (Elliott Gould), and they’re regularly visited by their annoying weed dealer Andre (Zack Pearlman). In the pilot, Mulaney gets a job writing for comedian-turned-game-show-host Lou Cannon, played by Martin Short. Between the acts, Mulaney does stand-up on set. The obvious comparison to one of the most successful sitcoms of all time was the first bar Mulaney failed to clear. Seinfeld famously needed a summer of reruns to find an audience, a chance Mulaney didn’t get. But I don’t think it would’ve made much of a difference.
For the first handful of episodes, almost all of the non-Martin-Short-related humor comes straight out of Mulaney’s stand-up. And I do mean straight out—he not only reenacts stories he’s already told on stage, he repeats jokes verbatim, like the one about seeing a wheelchair on its side on the sidewalk. “Something happened here. You hope it was a miracle!” To work this into the dialogue, he says it to his friends while they sit in the waiting room at his doctor’s office, begging the question: Why does a grown man need two friends to accompany him to a routine doctor visit? The answer is “So his character had someone to say funny things to,” which is not, like, great storytelling.
It goes on like that for a bit, alternating serviceably funny scenes with head-scratching decisions—like playing workplace sexual harassment for laughs, or having Nick Kroll play a spray-tanned, thickly accented Mexican. If these choices had bite but aged poorly, it would be one thing, but the whole time I was just wondering…this? For this, he recruited Elliott Gould? This is what John Mulaney wants to talk about?
If these choices had bite but aged poorly, it would be one thing, but the whole time I was just wondering…this? For this, he recruited Elliott Gould? This is what John Mulaney wants to talk about?
Shows built around a stand-up reflect that performer’s particular sensibility and point of view on life. I can only imagine how much of Mulaney’s unique perspective was sanded-down by network notes—no, wait, I don’t have to imagine. In 2023, Mulaney told us himself: “There was another version at NBC called Mulaney Don’t Drink... It was based on the time in my life when I got sober at 23 and had two roommates and was just trying to figure out: What does a good person do? That was an actual part of my life, or a pointless gauntlet I threw down in front of myself. There was really something lost when I, on the advice of others higher up, took that out. But I take full responsibility. I lost the thread that made it something.” If any of those higher-ups are reading this: boooo. You shoulda let him do the sober thing.
As for the show that did get made, it doesn’t help that Mulaney himself doesn’t look particularly comfortable in his own skin, a plastic doll moving around the set for no other reason than to hit his marks. The casts of Seinfeld, Friends, How I Met Your Mother, and other chummy multi-cams had an easy chemistry and were quirky, physical performers. Even the cast of Cheers managed to play to the rafters while seated. Without a mic, Mulaney seems unsure what to do with his hands.
Credit where credit’s due: His acting has come far in the decade since. More credit: The second half of the batch of episodes is much better than the first. Episode 5, about Mulaney’s relationship to prayer and its unfortunate power, has a fun Curb Your Enthusiasm kind of logic. Things get zanier with Short; a flashback to his USO days is dumb, but in a way I hadn’t seen a hundred times before. I particularly like the episode where John realizes the kindest thing he can do for a tween girl he’s befriended is to let her make fun of him to look cool in front of her peers.
Eventually, the series drops the stand-up bits in favor of interstitial cards, though thankfully it never loses Ice-T’s punchy if random episode introductions. But it still runs into the issue of using Mulaney’s existing life stories as fodder for plot without moving beyond the basic premise of “guy in New York has a tough day.” One episode opens with Mulaney’s audition tape for the lead role in Home Alone. In real life he was asked to audition for the role, and now resents Macaulay Culkin, who does not cameo. And so we get a half hour of jokes about Macaulay Culkin in the year 2015.
That same year, Mulaney told Vulture he had no regrets. “If I had to go back, I would have made the show I made because I wanted to make that show. I wanted to get it out of my system. It wasn’t like if I could go back in time I’d do a single-cam.” In 2020, he addressed the coulda-woulda-shoulda again, this time with GQ: “I would do the exact show I did before and maybe make a few changes with the audience. I'm not being defiant about it…I lost the thread a little sometimes. But I meant to make a multi-cam, live audience sitcom that was stupid, that didn't deal with dating, that dealt with things like haunted houses and losing a three legged dog and figuring out how to replace it and does that mean buying a four legged dog and doing anything terrible, or does that mean getting a three legged gerbil, and through the use of forced perspective, building a miniature version of the apartment to trick the person.” Oh yeah, the three-legged dog episode. I liked that one too.
Mulaney was so strung out during the GQ conversation that he doesn’t remember it, which I know because he talks about how he doesn’t remember it at the end of Baby J. And like a good stand-up should, he punches up his own life for comedic effect; in the special, he quotes himself as saying, “I would do the exact same show I did before, and the only thing I would change is the audience.” I really can’t recommend Baby J strongly enough. In terms of mining your life for material? Masterclass—a rich cast of characters, episodes both relatable and shocking, a charismatic storyteller, and a satisfying conclusion. If Mulaney had to die for Mulaney to move on to bigger and better things, if it was the failure that led to success, the lesson he needed to learn, it was worth it.
But as a show? No, it wasn’t very good. FL
