John Mulaney is returning to late-night television after the success of his oddball, one-week-only show “Everybody’s in L.A.,” which debuted on Netflix last year.

Although he was clear that the first show was strictly a six-episode gig, it appears its popularity enticed both the streamer and the stand-up comedian to invest in a series with a more regular cadence. Titled “Everybody’s Live With John Mulaney,” the live show will premiere Wednesday at 7 p.m. PT and run for 12 consecutive weeks.

On Monday, Mulaney announced via social media that the first episode will feature actor Michael Keaton, legendary folk singer-songwriter Joan Baez, comedian pal Fred Armisen and personal finance columnist and former Times editor Jessica Roy as guests. Hip-hop group Cypress Hill will be the musical guest.

In an interview with “CBS Sunday Morning,” Mulaney said the live aspect of the show was what excited him the most. The stakes make it a fun challenge, he said.

“It’s a fun feeling to know that, hopefully, a lot of people are watching and it’s live globally with no delay, and you could really damage your career,” he said.

Mulaney is serving as host, co-showrunner and executive producer through his company, Multiple Camera Productions. Netflix’s tagline for the show jokingly dubs it “the first-ever celebrity sit-down talk show.”

“We will never be relevant. We will never be your source for news. We will always be reckless. Netflix will always provide us with data that we will ignore,” Mulaney told press after the show’s premiere date was revealed at a Netflix presentation in January.

The comedian, whose brand was, at one point, largely tied to being a New Yorker, now resides in Los Angeles. He showed off his interest in the city in “Everybody’s in L.A.,” highlighting local experts and issues and taking live calls from Angelenos.

“Everybody’s in L.A.” had a starkly ’70s aesthetic, from the living room decor adorning the stage to Mulaney’s suits. The show also drew upon the sketch humor of “Saturday Night Live,” where Mulaney worked as a writer for several years before making it big in stand-up.

A brief promo for “Everybody’s Live” shows Mulaney standing outside a studio lot next to an old car running with the door open, indicating that this series will match the randomness of its predecessor.

“Netflix just made a deal with the devil,” Mulaney says as the ultra-wide shot zooms in on him. “‘Everybody’s Live With John Mulaney’ starts March 12, Wednesday night. Talk show!”

The camera then shoots into a tight shot of him whipping his sunglasses off (it’s pitch black outside). A second teaser features the same wide shot as Mulaney asks off-camera crew to let him know when the shot is tight enough for him to start talking.

Beyond the aesthetic, other elements of “Everybody’s in L.A.” will bleed into “Everybody’s Live.” That includes his sidekick and emcee, Richard Kind, and the show’s delivery bot, Saymo.

“We’re having trouble finding Saymo, so we just keep ordering Shastas and ginger ales and hoping that he’ll roll up,” Mulaney said at the January presentation. “Richard and I met through a real-life ‘Baby Reindeer’ scenario. He kept showing up where I worked and I decided to incorporate him into my life.”

The new series also will feature a mix of celebrities, comedians, experts and academics, as “Everybody’s in L.A.” did. Many of Mulaney’s comedy peers made appearances, including Jon Stewart, Jerry Seinfeld, Nate Bargatze and Sarah Silverman. They joined seismologist Lucy Jones, paleontologist Emily Lindsey, hypnotherapist Kerry Gaynor and other specialists on Mulaney’s guest couches, creating some unexpected pairings and unpredictable conversations. Mulaney promised more odd couples will join him for the new show.

“Everybody’s Live” will be the latest in a long-standing collaboration between Mulaney and Netflix. The show will join his comedy specials, a 2019 variety special called “John Mulaney & the Sack Lunch Bunch” and other projects on the streaming service.

Nancy Vandergroot (Nicole Kidman), the dewy-eyed protagonist of Mimi Cave’s sophomore feature Holland, has a tendency to somersault to conclusions. At the start of this stylish but plodding film, which premiered at SXSW ahead of its March 27 release on Prime Video, the suburban mother loses a pearl earring. Her husband Fred (a chilling Matthew Macfadyen) suggests she check her junk drawer or the jars housing her craft supplies. Nancy, convinced of her own theories, accuses her son’s tutor, Candy (Rachel Sennott), of theft and promptly fires the befuddled high-school student. 

This is a clever introduction to Nancy because later, when she conscripts her friend Dave (Gael García Bernal) to help her investigate whether or not Fred is having an affair, you can’t help but wonder if Nancy might be jumping to conclusions again. Of course anyone familiar with Cave, whose directorial debut Fresh established her as a filmmaker to watch, will know that Fred, the town’s ophthalmologist, is certainly hiding a secret. The real question is what kind. 

Working from a screenplay by Andrew Sodroski, Cave constructs a visually compelling answer to this question. Holland boasts striking advancements in the director’s style and committed performances from Kidman, Macfadyen and Bernal, but these qualities can’t quite save a narrative fundamentally confused about its purpose. Sodroski’s story hinges on a single, shocking twist that, once revealed (more than two-thirds of the way into the film), hampers instead of helps the third act. It squanders the deftly calibrated anxious suspense, turning Holland into a study of suburban paranoia and domestic isolation that slackens over time.

Before Nancy became suspicious of her husband, she lived contentedly as a home economics teacher and devoted wife in their small town. It’s sometime in the early aughts and Cave opens Holland with a charmed testimonial about the lakefront Michigan locale. Nancy, through voiceover, describes a harmonious existence characterized by her loving family, their stately white home and the annual tulip festival. Cave juxtaposes this supposed serenity with a technicolor aesthetic that establishes an uneasy surrealism. There’s a dreamy quality to each scene, which destabilizes confidence in what’s real. 

Below the pristine surface of Nancy’s life, secrets fester. She suspects Fred’s infidelity after a series of small discoveries, and confides in Dave, a shop teacher at the high school where she works. He harbors a faint crush on her and, in an irrational and lovelorn frenzy, agrees to help her snoop.

The early parts of their adventure possess the feverish quality of new and illicit experiences. It also awakens Nancy from a life she likens to carbon monoxide poisoning — slow and comforting in its kill. This is not the first time Kidman has played a woman rebelling against the gilded confines of her existence, so the actress delivers a reliably fine performance. She vacillates frantically between Nancy’s public performance of innocence and a more subdued desire for risk, giving the character an enticing and unpredictable edge. 

As Nancy and Dave continue to gather evidence, Nancy’s anxieties balloon. She has nightmares about her son Harry (Jude Hill) in danger and imagines herself as a stilted figurine in the intricate diorama her husband has been working on in the garage. She also starts sleeping with Dave and is plagued by complicated feelings around this affair.

The real star of Holland is Cave’s style, which builds a disturbing portrait of suburban unease. Partnering with Fresh cinematographer Pawel Pogorzelski again, the director renders that state as a fever dream defined by claustrophobic shots, frenetic crosscuts and dizzying tilts and pans. Composer Alex Somers (Nickel Boys) adds to this tension by punctuating the ethereal foundation of his score with foreboding elements. All of these choices root us in Nancy’s unsettled psyche, upending earlier assumptions about her personality. 

Unfortunately, Cave’s uncanny portrayal of Nancy’s emotional and physical world struggles against the confusion of a scattered story. Bernal gives a strong turn as Dave, especially as the teacher’s determination to protect Nancy mutates into an excited obsession. There’s evidence early on that this character has moved to Holland for a fresh start, but the film never returns to that plot point. A similar fate befalls a thread that touches on the xenophobia suppurating right beneath the town’s genteel exterior and the significance of the tulip festival.

Too many of these instances weigh on Holland as it plods along, somewhat unsteadily, under the weight of abandoned storylines. The big reveal alleviates some of the pressure, but the shock of it comes a little too late, and what proceeds to unfold in the third act feels like a film disappointedly letting out almost all its air.

Three artists have been commissioned to create the first wave of installations for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s new David Geffen Galleries, scheduled to open in April next year. The expansive site-specific works will help to define the look and feel of the Peter Zumthor-designed building, and in the case of one artwork — a 75,000-square-foot stretch of embellished and brushed concrete — literally provide the ground on which visitors walk.

The artists — Mariana Castillo Deball, Sarah Rosalena and Shio Kusaka — were all picked based on their previous work at LACMA and for how themes espoused in their art, including land rights and a fascination with the cosmos, fit with the ethos of the new building’s modernist design.

“I have a rule in my life: If you get stuck, you ask people for advice. If you get really stuck, you ask an artist,” said LACMA President and Chief Executive Michael Govan during a recent visit to the site, where Castillo Deball was immersed in crafting her piece, “Feathered Changes.”

The idea for Castillo Deball’s commission rose from the question of what to do around the 900-foot-long concrete building, which curves over Wilshire Boulevard and is outfitted with floor-to-ceiling glass. Traditional landscape architecture wasn’t cutting it, Govan said, and he kept thinking about the idea of a map on the ground.

“Feathered Changes” serves as the museum plaza floor and occupies an area roughly the size of three football fields. It forms a series of concrete islands leading to various entrances and extends through the restaurant. The piece, which is characterized by an earth-colored mix of unfinished concrete that both complements and contrasts with the building, is imprinted with pieces of Castillo Deball’s feathered serpent drawings inspired by ancient murals from Teotihuacán, Mexico. Other areas are raked in patterns resembling a Zen garden, and some contain replica tracks of native animals, including coyotes, bears and snakes. Small stones have been cast into the mix, creating a rough, uneven color and texture.

“This is the biggest challenge I’ve had in my life,” Castillo Deball said after using a custom rake to carve wet concrete at the base of the building. Concrete workers swarmed around her in hardhats. “It’s a place that is gonna be totally public, so everybody can go in and step on it,” she said. “It’s a very democratic piece of art that is also in dialogue with this amazing building, with the collection, with the curators.”

Castillo Deball, who splits her time between Mexico City and Berlin, is no stranger to large-scale, L.A.-based projects. She created four landscape-focused collages for the concourse level of Metro’s Wilshire/La Cienega station. But the LACMA commission is by far the biggest piece of art she has made, and she said she’s learned a great deal from the process.

“I feel like an engineer,” she said, smiling from under her hardhat. “I never knew so much about concrete and rebar.”

Castillo Deball also relishes collaborating with the team of specialized workers employed to assist her in pouring — and taming — the tricky cement.

“They’re all Mexican. They come from Jalisco, and we communicate in Spanish,” she said. “And they always ask me, what am I doing? What does it mean? And then a lot of solutions, we also develop them together. And they’re so curious and proud that a Mexican artist is doing something like this.”

The building, which has asymmetrical overhead lighting resembling stars, represents the sky, Govan noted, and Castillo Deball’s artwork tethers the building to the land.

“All the other ground solutions seemed mechanical,” Govan said.

Sarah Rosalena, from left, Mariana Castillo Deball and Shio Kusaka were selected to create new works based, in part, on how themes espoused in their art fit with the ethos of the modernist design of the new David Geffen Galleries.

(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)

Govan had recently flown in from Tilburg in the Netherlands, where he visited the TextielMuseum’s TextielLab with interdisciplinary artist and weaver Sarah Rosalena. Her commission — an 11-by-26½-foot tapestry invoking the ethereal topography of Mars — was being woven on one of the largest Jacquard looms in the world. A few weeks later, a test swath of the tapestry was shipped to LACMA so Rosalena could see how colors and materials looked and felt.

“I was really interested in pushing the textile to really think about terrain,” said Rosalena, standing over the tapestry, which was laid out on a long conference table in a nearby office tower with a bird’s-eye view of the new building. “So that’s experimenting with different yarns. Some of it looks like clouds. Some of it almost looks like ocean or water. Some of it looks atmospheric, but definitely otherworldly.”

Rosalena is an Angeleno of Wixárika heritage whose practice merges ancient Indigenous craft with computer-driven science and technology to challenge colonial narratives and examine global problems such as climate change and cultural hegemony. She has fond memories of watching her grandmother weave on a backstrap loom while growing up in La Cañada Flintridge, and found that she was just as skilled at computer programming as she was at making textiles.

Sarah Rosalena’s 26-foot long weaving, “Omnidirectional Terrain” (2025), in progress on the jacquard-rapier loom at TextielLab in Tilburg, Netherlands.

(Alexandra Ross)

“My mother would also do a lot of weaving and beading,” said Rosalena, a professor at UC Santa Barbara. But it wasn’t until she got interested in photo and digital media processes that she saw their relationship to weaving.

When it’s complete, the tapestry, “Omnidirectional Terrain,” will hang on the 30-foot wall in the museum restaurant, where it will be visible through the glass that looks in from the courtyard and Castillo Deball’s “Feathered Changes.” The patterns that Castillo Deball will have created underfoot will run beneath Rosalena’s work — the earth beneath a mercurial red sky.

The third commission, by ceramicist Kusaka, will be around the corner from the first two, in a plaza. Kusaka laid out a series of drawings on small white pieces of paper on the conference table, tracing the evolution of her idea from a basic sketch to what she hopes will be its final iteration: a 12-foot-tall interactive sculpture featuring a flying saucer atop a cone of bright light, which children and adults can enter, ostensibly to be beamed up to the craft — if only for a fun photograph.

“When students are in the education center, they’re looking through glass at it, which will be a nice inspiration,” Govan said. “You’ll also see it as you’re on Wilshire. What is that interesting thing? So that was the idea.”

Preparatory sketches for Shio Kusaka’s LACMA-commissioned sculpture. The second includes a figure to show scale.

(Shio Kusaka)

Creating visitor attractions that can be shared on social media has proved a savvy marketing strategy at LACMA, where Chris Burden’s “Urban Light” installation of city streetlamps and Michael Heizer’s “Levitated Mass,” often referred to as the Rock, have grown from Instagram moments to beloved civic landmarks.

Kusaka’s playful forms are most commonly seen in her ceramic pots, vases and vessels, often glazed with bright colors and decorated with whimsical geometric patterns. Her obsession with space and space creatures finds its lineage in some pots she shows from a book of her work. Some have buttons resembling the control panel of a spaceship; others have little faces that could be alien.

“I don’t like making big things for no reason. I really like small things I can hold,” Kusaka said. “But it’s really fun to have a reason that I can go this big, which might be a part of why I want a person to go inside.”

Kusaka was born in Japan and learned traditional crafts from her grandparents. Her grandmother taught tea ceremonies, and her grandfather taught calligraphy.

“I never thought that I was gonna relate to what they did at the time. But I do see the relationship now,” said Kusaka, explaining how she began her study of ceramics in college in Boulder, Colo. “So I was touching ceramics a lot, and then I learned how to look at tools and to appreciate their functions.”

Her fanciful commission for LACMA charts a new course, but in a way, she said, it’s still a vessel.