John Mulaney’s new comedy Mulaney hit the screen at the 10th annual PaleyFest in Beverly Hills on Monday night, joining the pediatric ward dramedy Red Band Society for an unlikely pairing of pilot sneak previews from Fox’s upcoming fall season. Both screenings were followed by panel discussions with cast members, including Mulaney himself.

Debuting October 5, Mulaney is a multi-camera sitcom that follows the lives of a young stand-up comic, Mulaney, and his friends and neighbors in New York. Though Seinfeld is one of the series’ obvious ancestors, when asked by the panel’s host, Entertainment Weekly writer Darren Franich, what other shows have influenced him, Mulaney’s response was a laundry list of classic comedies, including The Cosby Show, Golden Girls, I Love Lucy and even Sergeant Bilko, whose “scheming idiots” he said he “tries to emulate.”

Originally part of the NBC family, Mulaney’s original pilot was dropped last year before coming to Fox, where his initial sit-down with Kevin Reilly “was the best meeting I’ve ever had,” he said. Claiming the former entertainment chairman at Fox instructed him to “loosen up,” Mulaney said that Reilly told him, “‘I just want a funny show about a comedian and his people.’” Those were the words he needed to hear to turn the show from a familiar-feeling sitcom into a familiar-feeling sitcom with its own fresh and original voice.

“I loved the NBC pilot,” Mulaney said. “Elements of it are still alive in this version. 90% of them. But it was very ‘pilot-y.’”

Sharing the stage with costars Martin Short, Elliott Gould, Nasim Pedrad, Seaton Smith and Zach Pearlman, Mulaney said he “really enjoys standing by” his incredibly talented cast. “I try to rise to that occasion,” he said.

Following the Mulaney presentation, Fox’s Red Band Society pilot and a small panel also rose to the occasion at the Paley Center – sometimes quite literally. In one scene in the dramedy’s first episode, a teenager with lung cancer tries to seduce his beautiful nurse by showing her his erection. It was a discomforting moment in a roller coaster of a first episode that careened wildly between crass humor, tender drama and even magical realism as it followed its cast of young and stricken around their unplanned residencies in a hospital pediatric ward.

Fox’s marketing push for Red Band Society has rightly pitched the show to The Fault in Our Stars set, emphasizing friendship and romance amidst the inherent pathos of sick children. But Society has an intriguingly nasty streak as well, cutting through the buttery Coldplay and Coldplay-esque music cues like a hot knife. Speaking after the screening, the show’s executive producer Rina Mimoun said the show’s writing team strives to “take the comedy further and find the absurd against this serious backdrop.”

Also on the post-screening stage were Society cast members Rebecca Rittenhouse, who plays newbie nurse Brittany, and former My So-Called Life star Wilson Cruz, who claimed his on-set repartee with the show’s biggest name, Octavia Spencer, is like “the Olympiad of sassiness.” Spencer was not present on the panel to demonstrate this claim.

Feeling almost like a boarding school saga, but dropped into the sterile confines of the medical establishment, Mimoun said Society, which is also executive produced by Steven Spielberg, “has many different flavors,” drawing from the sentimentality of the Catalan series it’s based on, Polseres vermelles, “but with a healthy dose of humor… We are a much more cynical group of people here in the States.”

With a 13-episode season ahead of it, the timeline of Society’s plot will cover only three weeks in the lives of its characters, explained Mimoun, a sign of a television era where even the big network shows are built around small, sustained arcs. For the show creators’ part, she said, “we have to just be enjoying the ride and trust the audience is following along… We’re so fortunate this show is on Fox. Everyone has been so behind the show in terms of marketing and every time we show them anything they’re like, ‘can you edge it up?’ They’re not interested in the soft sell.”

Image on outset: Martin Short and John Mulaney; Top image: Rina Mimoun, Rebecca Rittenhouse, Wilson Cruz and Darren Franich.

Images courtesy of Kevin Parry for The Paley Center for Media.

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