This week's Mulaney continued the very slow upward trend from last week, but at the rate its going it'll be cancelled long before it actually gets good.

There are a number of problems, but the biggest one is that it often seems to be fighting its own format. Every applause break plays awkward, and a lot of concepts that could be more fully exploited in a single-cam style here play as half-baked; Andre's Halloween costume and Motif's alleged haunting were both funny ideas that basically went nowhere because there was no easy way to display them for a live studio audience besides simply talking about them. Talking can be funny- Mulaney's made a career of it, in fact- but it's not really why people watch sitcoms (except Gilmore Girls, I guess).

At a more nuts-and-bolts level, the cast is (slowly) growing into their characters, though Mulaney himself remains uncomfortable and shifty on-camera. Pedrad remains probably the show's comic MVP, though she wasn't given much to work with this week in yet another plot that would have worked much better in single-cam (her big sequence was more-or-less single camera anyway, though it consequently stuck out like a sore thumb and broke the tone). Elliot Gould still seems to be mostly phoning it in, but the writers haven't exactly given him anything worth getting out of bed for. Martin Short remains Martin Short, which is mostly a good thing but not enough to save the show by itself. Seaton Smith is still stuck playing "loud black guy," but he's starting to show signs of a more specific personality centered around self-obsession and uncontrollable mental momentum, which is encouraging and potentially very funny. Mulaney's co-workers remain an under-utilized comic highlight, and the show might be better served spending more of Andre/Oscar's screen time with the Lou Cannon gang.

Moving on to the writing, the humor was about the same as last week; very sharp, but more often clever than particularly funny. This is fine- Matthew Perry's made a Sitcom Hall of Fame career out of playing 70% clever/30% funny types- but the arrangement felt awkward, as the humor was all over the place. Mulaney's A-plot about the dead joke writer was very dark and cynical (and mostly funny), while Motif and Jane were each doing stories about the very same topic that could have come from Family Guy. It's possible to blend the two styles (Archer does it beautifully, as does Bojack Horseman) but far from easy, and that kind of graceful fusion is far from something Mulaney is ready to approach with any degree of finesse this early in its infancy.

Despite those complaints, the show was at least better this week about not selling its own characters out in the name of a joke, though it's certainly still guilty of it (Jane probably got it the worst, but Mulaney got hit with hit too). Forgive me for beating a dead horse here, but even that foible seems largely a product of the show's sensibilities clashing with its format; Jane's musical sequence would have been much more at home in a single camera show like 30 Rock or Always Sunny, and Mulaney's journey to the cemetery could have played a lot better with the visual flexibility and atmosphere allowed by single-cam production. I mention 30 Rock and Sunny specifically because the show's heart is a Frankenstinian mashup of 30 Rock's cartoon manic neurosis and Always Sunny's viciousness and serial escalation; blending the two is an idea with a ton of merit, but there's a reason neither of those shows were done as a live-studio audience multi-cam laugh track throwback, and the reason is that it would be nearly impossible to do well and very likely terrible.

And, despite some clever writing, Mulaney is still terrible. The tragedy is that it really doesn't have to be.