Fox would like you to meet John Mulaney, star of the new series “Mulaney” — and is offering up a 22-minute video to help things along.
The real John Mulaney, is, like all people, kind of complicated. He’s a nice Midwesterner who came to New York, wrote for “Saturday Night Live,” co-created Stefon and became a top stand-up comic.
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Lorne Michaels, the show’s executive producer and his boss at “SNL,” describes him as “very — in an old-fashioned sense — clean-cut.” Or as Mulaney tells an audience in the clip, he’s “a slice of whitebread moving through New York City.’” (The comedy is one of 11 TV Shows We’re Excited About This Season.)
But Mulaney is a little darker than he lets on. In his act, he talks about quitting drinking after a lot of blackouts. He also jokes about tabloids’ tendency to exaggerate the beauty of murder victims, and dissects a meeting with an aggressively oversharing, new-in-town homeless man.
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So far the only bleakness in “Mulaney” is about ego and greed, which are also rich sources of comedy: Martin Short, as Mulaney’s boss, boasts about his “two Emmys and a daytime Tony.” And roommate Nasim Pedrad refuses to pay rent because she’s out of checks.
The observations carry a little more weight when you realize Mulaney has seen more than his exterior suggests. Yes, Mulaney is whitebread. But there’s some texture there.
Watch the video: