Nobody Wants a John Mulaney Talk Show Without Sidekick Richard Kind
Netflix recently announced that comedian John Mulaney will host a new live variety talk show in 2025, breaking the news via an unusually defensive and vaguely hostile social media post.
Netflix’s Chief Content Officer Bela Bajaria provided some additional details at the Bloomberg Screentime conference on Thursday, including the fact the show will be weekly, and the decision to greenlight it was based on the success of John Mulaney Presents: Everybody’s in L.A. earlier this year. “I was there at a couple of the tapings, and it was so bold and original and fresh and unprecedented, unpredictable. And I think it’ll be really fun to get to do a live show with him,” Bajaria explained.
It’s unclear whether or not the show will be a direct extension of Everybody’s in L.A., or something wholly original, but one thing is clear, it definitely needs to include the participation of character actor Richard Kind. This is not up for debate.
Kind, who has appeared in innumerable movies and TV shows over the years, previously worked with Mulaney on the 2019 Netflix special John Mulaney & the Sack Lunch Bunch, hosting the segment “Girl Talk with Richard Kind,” where he chatted with three kids about his work in A Bug's Life and his love of the theater.
Netflix
But most importantly, he was the Ed McMahon to Mulaney’s Carson (or the Hank Kingsley to his Larry Sanders) on Everybody’s in L.A.
Kind contributed to the success of the experimental talk show in more ways than you might think. His earnest, goofy sweetness arguably kept the show from veering too far into smug self-satisfaction. And Kind’s showbiz experience helped to anchor the project, which, by design, was in constant danger of descending into total and utter chaos.
Kind is also just a funny dude, and was frequently hilarious on the show, whether he was throwing out an off-the-cuff question to a guest expert, or donning a tie-dye hoodie to try and score LSD at the Hollywood Bowl.
Judging from the online response to this news, I’m certainly not alone in hoping that Kind will be invited back for the new show. Fans have been imploring Mulaney and Netflix to immediately hire Kind, threatening to “riot” if they don’t, and even sending up the Richard Kind-Signal.
Kind recently stated in an interview that he will “pretty much take 93 percent of jobs,” which means that he should be fairly easy to lock down for the new variety show, or really any show at all.
It also means that anyone who’s ever tried and failed to get Kind to appear in their project should feel extra terrible about themselves.
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