Comment on TV: 'Mulaney’ isn’t entirely bad, and that’s an improvement

Mulaney and his team have worked on the sitcom and improved it, largely by reducing Martin Short’s role as Lou Cannon, a self-obsessed, comedian/game show host who hires Mulaney, playing a version of himself as struggling standup comic, to write for him. [...] Short is more integrated as a member of an ensemble that includes Mulaney’s two roommates, Jane (Nasim Pedrad, “Saturday Night Live” ) and fellow struggling comic Motif (Seaton Smith, “Pancake Mountain”), their hirsute local pot dealer Andre (Zack Pearlman, “The Inbetweeners,” MTV version) and their gay neighbor Oscar (Elliott Gould, “M.A.S.H”). Where “Seinfeld” prided itself on being a show about nothing, “Mulaney” goes for unlikely shtick, such as Lou so obsessed with his own posthumous image that every time he thinks he’s on the verge of buying the farm, he spits out the words, “I did it for the laughs,” so they will be remembered as his last words. Sure, it makes sense for a stand-up comic to mine his or her own life experiences in a TV sitcom, but why would you think you could get away with replicating the structure and general concept of a classic? [...] the truth is, you can steal from either the best or the worst, but in the end, you have to make people laugh on your own. The cast is OK, although Mulaney tries so hard to make them hilariously wacky that each one comes off as a version of Cecily Strong’s the Girl You Wish You Hadn’t Started a Conversation With at a Party.