It’s not a great time to be a late-night talk show host. Ratings are down pretty much across the board. Shows like Late Night With Seth Meyers and The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon have been forced to make cuts, ditching their house band and scaling back production to four days a week, respectively, as NBC trims its budget. And in recent years, the genre as a whole has had to reckon with the fact that most people would rather watch celebrities sweat through a series of hot wings on YouTube than sit through a traditional late-night interview promoting their latest project.

In other words, it’s a weird time for John Mulaney to be launching Everybody’s Live With John Mulaney, a weekly live talk show which kicks off tonight on Netflix and will air every Wednesday at 10 p.m. ET for an initial 12-week run (and has already been renewed for a second season). There were no real stakes when the comedian did Everybody’s in L.A., the six-day experiment last May that eventually spawned Everybody’s Live, but in order to achieve long-term success, Mulaney will have to find a way to shake up a struggling genre and do what no one before him has been able to do: get people to watch a talk show on a streaming service.

Can he do it? That remains to be seen, of course, but these are our biggest questions.

Can Mulaney Break Netflix’s Talk Show Losing Streak?

Everybody’s in L.A. and Everybody’s Live are not Netflix’s first attempts at a talk show. Chelsea Handler’s Chelsea debuted on the streamer in 2016 and managed to last two seasons before being canceled. The Break With Michelle Wolf launched in 2018 and only made it 10 episodes before being put out of its misery. The Joel McHale Show With Joel McHale, also a 2018 effort, fared only slightly better, lasting 19 episodes before being canceled due to low viewership.

The problem, historically, has been that talk shows are generally topical, and they’re not something that people tend to seek out on a streaming service. Streaming, by its very nature, is something that people do at their own pace, and there’s no real incentive to go back and binge old episodes of a talk show to get “caught up.” But Netflix has had ample opportunity to experiment with the format and learn from its mistakes. They shifted Chelsea from three episodes a week to one in its second season, realizing that it’s easier to get people to tune in once a week — as they would for, say, a prestige drama — than to try to cultivate the kind of nightly audiences broadcast networks are accustomed to.

The buzz that Everybody’s in L.A. received bodes well for Everybody’s Live, and the fact that it’s not so beholden to the news cycle gives it a leg up. Mulaney’s more interested in taking calls from viewers, hiring psychologists to analyze comedians and spoofing the traditional political field piece with “Reverse Borat” than he is in weighing in on the latest headlines.

John Mulaney’s live, zany Netflix show was a wild ride. And then there were the clothes.

Will There Be Any Pressure to Bring in Money?

Despite the fact that streaming services have not had much luck with talk shows thus far, they have managed to hurt traditional broadcast viewership (which means less advertising money). “It has become a gigantic issue because the streaming services have taught a lot of viewers to not be tolerant at all of advertising,” Bill Carter, author of The Late Shift and The War for Late Night and editor-at-large of LateNighter told me recently. “Let’s say you’re a big Jimmy Fallon fan. You can watch him the night before, or you can say, ‘I’ll just go watch the highlights tomorrow.’”

Everybody’s in L.A. reportedly averaged 1.1 million viewers per episode — not terrible, but also not a particularly large audience. But Netflix seems all in on Mulaney and not particularly concerned about how many eyeballs it’s able to draw in. As Netflix executive Robbie Praw said in a recent interview with Vulture, “If you look, John Mulaney is not only one of the most viewed stand-ups on Netflix, he is one of the top ticket-selling stand-ups in the world. So we have a lot of confidence that the new show that we’re doing, Everybody’s Live With John Mulaney, is going to break through. These types of shows have always grown over time. And again, there is nobody like John out there. If you watched SNL50, with 50 years of some of the biggest stars in comedy, John Mulaney stood out in that room and on that show.”

Of course, it’s easier to have that confidence when you’re a $392 billion company that’s not beholden to advertisers.

Will the Fact That It’s Live Keep It Fresh?

Netflix has been leaning hard into live events lately, whether it’s streaming this year’s SAG Awards, airing live Love Is Blind reunions or teaming up with the WWE for wrestling events. The fact that Everybody’s Live is, indeed, live not only adds to its appeal for the streaming service — it also gives it a fighting chance at pushing the late-night format forward.

Carter is convinced that if late-night talk shows are going to survive, they’ll need to evolve by airing live and offering something different than all of the other celebrity interview content cluttering YouTube at any given moment.

“It adds an edge and it makes it feel a little more electric. It separates them from the heavily edited things that you’re going to see all over the internet,” he explained. “It’s a bit of a high-wire act then. If you bomb and nobody laughs, that’s not a good show, so it adds an element of challenge. I think there’s still an avenue for it, but I think it’s going to take a lot of creativity.”

Mulaney obviously has tried it, and the live element of Everybody’s in L.A. was one of its biggest advantages. Taking live calls from viewers a la Larry King resulted in some hilariously weird conversations (including one memorable segment where Mulaney asked callers if they’d ever met a ghost), and it also provides incentive for people to tune into the show as it’s actually airing instead of just scrolling through shorter clips the next day. His background as a stand-up comedian serves him extremely well here — taking calls is basically doing crowd work — but we also know that Mulaney is very good at being on live TV specifically. His years as a writer (and a six-time host) on Saturday Night Live mean that he knows what works live and what doesn’t, and on the rare occasion that a bit doesn’t work, he’s not afraid to embrace the chaos. (Mulaney is one of only a handful of hosts or comics who are just as funny when they’re bombing. See also: Conan O’Brien, David Letterman.)

Everybody’s in L.A. took the best elements of old-school talk shows and modernized them just enough. Letting all the guests sit next to each other and chat amongst themselves during each segment is great, but having them do it without the safety net of a tape delay gives it the potential to be truly riveting. I’ll be tuning in tonight to see if Everybody’s Live can capture that late-night magic we’ve been missing.

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