Richard Kind, Fred Armisen, Jessica Roy, Michael Keaton, Joan Baez, and Mulaney on Everybody’s Live with John Mulaney.

Photo: Ryan West/Netflix

Getting Baez, Michael Keaton, Fred Armisen, personal finance columnist Jessica Roy, and Mulaney’s longtime friend and collaborator Richard Kind together to take audience calls about the intricacies of loaning out money was a wise move on the show’s part—after all, what late-night show can survive without a deep bench of star power?—but the moments of Everybody’s Live that I loved the most were the smaller, more nonsensical ones, such as the chyron that called Mulaney “Talk Show Host (White)”; a truly bizarre sketch featuring Tracy Morgan as “King Latifah”; and the return of Saymo, Mulaney’s beloved delivery robot from Everybody’s in LA. The whole night felt like nothing so much as an inside joke Mulaney had with himself, and really, who wouldn’t want to be in on that?

Nobody can deny that it’s been a challenging few months for Angelenos, and while even the best of talk-show hosts couldn’t fix our city’s systemic issues alone, there’s something really wonderful about watching Mulaney set such an idiosyncratic and wholly fluff-free series here. After all, New York has gotten more than its share of late-night shine, and we’re way overdue for an LA-based show that’s willing to get weird as hell with it. I mean, Mulaney based an entire segment around various actors who have played the title role of Willy Lohman in Death of a Salesman! Does that make any concrete sense? No. Will I be seated for next week’s episode? Absolutely.