John Mulaney, Nick Kroll find most expensive way possible to reveal they didn't watch Succession
Mulaney: "Not to be a jerk, but if it’s so famous, how come we don’t know about it?”
Despite the way we run the vast majority of our lives, personal relationships, and incessantly running inner monologues, TV trivia is rarely a high-stakes sort of thing. Except when your failure to watch the popular HBO dramedy Succession costs anti-cancer fundraisers and non-profit workers fighting for the wrongly accused a cool hundred grand apiece, which is what happened to John Mulaney and Nick Kroll last night.
The long-time friends and comedy duo were saying oh, hello to ABC’s new celebrity spin on Who Wants To Be A Millionaire, and then ended up saying, welp, goodbye to a $125,000 question about a famous line delivered by Matthew Macfadyen on the HBO series. (Specifically, from the show’s fourth season premiere, “The Munsters.”) Or, to offer up Mulaney’s spin on it, once it was clear that he and Kroll were stumped by questions about a Burberry tote bag that Macfadyen’s Tom brutally roasts during an episode: “Not to be a jerk, but if it’s so famous, how come we don’t know about it?”
Helping to spread the mild humiliation around, Kroll and Mulaney used their last lifeline to ask host Jimmy Kimmel for his opinion on the question. And despite being an avowed fan of the Jesse Armstrong series, Kimmel immediately led them in the exactly wrong direction, eliminating the right answer (“ludicrously capacious”) because it “sounds like too much to me.” (Not when Tom Wambsgans is deploying it, it isn’t, Kimmel.) Having locked in their final answer (the far-too-prosaic “hideously expansive”), Mulaney and Kroll were eliminated, dropping them back down to the $32,000 mark, and costing their respective charities—The Innocence Project and Comedy Vs. Cancer—a sizable chunk of change.
It just goes to show, people: Watch everything, and memorize everything, or cancer and the wrongly accusers will win. Meanwhile, Celebrity WWTBAM (which we have already mentally re-filed as Hollywoo Stars And Celebrities: What Do They Know? Do They Know Things? Let’s Find Out) will presumably continue to dish out these kind of low-level, charity-endangering fumbles, with upcoming celeb duos including (via Variety) Kenan and Kel; Rosie O’Donnell and Lisa Ann Walter; John Stamos and Dave Coulier; Ray Romano and Brad Garrett; Zach Braff and Donald Faison; Lil Dicky and GaTa; Kelly and Jack Osbourne; Ike Barinholtz and Alan Barinholtz; Sebastian Maniscalco and Omar J. Dorsey; Nicole Byer and Sasheer Zamata; Sophia Bush and Alex Edelman; Gillian Jacobs and Danny Pudi; Natasha Leggero and Jason Ritter; Ron Funches and Reggie Watts; and Jeff Ross and “Cousin” Sal Iacono.