John Mulaney & the Sack Lunch Bunch perfectly parodies kids' TV while also being a great children's TV show

Rolling Stone

"Mulaney very clearly knows what he’s doing with The Sack Lunch Bunch," Alan Sepinwall says of the Netflix special, premiering Christmas Eve Day. "It’s a delightful hour-plus of silliness, just in time for the holidays, and it manages to answer the tonal question both ways. It is, like Galaxy Quest, The Princess Bride, or Jane the Virgin, one of those gems that manages to simultaneously parody a genre and be an excellent recreation of it. Riffing on sincere Seventies’ kids shows like Sesame Street or the Maurice Sendak/Carole King special Really Rosie, The Sack Lunch Bunch finds the 37-year-old Mulaney — who admits early on that he doesn’t have children of his own and doesn’t really want them — playing mentor to a group of kids in a neighborhood garden. The special kicks off (after a Real Housewives of Beverly Hills quote, because of course it does) with a member of the Bunch going on at length about his fear of drowning. ('Actually, I’m afraid of death,” he explains, “but of all the ways to die, I don’t want to drown.')"

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• John Mulaney & the Sack Lunch Bunch is a few things besides a children’s TV special: "It’s patently meant for adults as well as kids, for one thing," says Kathryn VanArendonk. "It’s a flagrantly nostalgic thing, as Mulaney also owns right at the top, a callback to the era when Sesame Street was a little dirtier and the rhythms of children’s programming had more Monty Python in them and less plodding pedantry. It feels a little like a bleaker Free to Be … You and Me, a piece of musical storytelling that started with the relatively radical proposition that kids and adults are all intelligent, emotional people. But beyond that, it is patently, unquestionably what Mulaney describes it to be: a thing that he made on purpose. There’s so much care and craft in Sack Lunch Bunch. All the musical numbers work, and occasionally they’re breathtakingly good."
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• John Mulaney was surprised by the results of John Mulaney & The Sack Lunch Bunch: "I don't know if I had the idea to do the finished project," he says. "Or rather, I did, but I wouldn't have been able to sum it up as such. It turned out above and beyond what I'd hoped, and also what I had somehow envisioned but not been able to articulate. I take no credit for saying it went above and beyond. It really was a huge group effort between our director, Rhys Thomas, and Marika Sawyer, who co-wrote everything with me, and Eli Bolin, who did all the music. I would say I had an idea to do some kind of eclectic, I guess, variety show, though that term applies to so many things. I wanted to do something presentational but not a sketch show. I wanted to both interview kids a little but also have them perform things I had written exactly as I wrote them."