Bob Saget reaches for a compliment and Martin Mull turns it down. “I don’t know where to begin because, to me, you truly are a jack-of-all-trades,” Saget tells him in the trailer for Who Is Martin Mull?, and Mull corrects the phrase before it can settle: “Jerk-of-all-trades.” It is a small exchange, and it holds most of what made Mull so hard to file. This was the man who played Colonel Mustard in Clue, Roseanne’s boss Leon Carp and the hapless private eye Gene Parmesan in Arrested Development, and he spent his life telling anyone who asked that the paintings mattered more. Neither man in that conversation lived to see the film they began together.

Who Is Martin Mull? is a feature-length Netflix documentary, a comedy portrait co-directed by Bob Saget and Neil Berkeley. Saget started the project, sat down with Mull for the core interviews and stayed on it as director and executive producer until his death. Berkeley, whose Gilbert gave Gilbert Gottfried the same kind of close attention, finished it after producer Sean Bradley asked him to help complete “the work that Bob Saget started.” Netflix describes the result as Mull’s story “told in his own words and by the friends who watched it happen,” and the friends are a telling list: Steve Martin, Tom Waits, David Alan Grier and Patton Oswalt, with Fred Willard, Mull’s old partner in fake late-night television, also in the film.

The title is a fair question for a career that reads like five résumés stapled together. Mull was a painter before he was anything else, with a bachelor’s and then a master’s degree in painting from the Rhode Island School of Design. He came out of art school and into folk clubs as a musician whose songs were jokes delivered with a straight face. He wrote a country single for Jane Morgan called “A Girl Named Johnny Cash,” recorded for Capricorn, the Georgia label better known for the Allman Brothers, and scraped the bottom of the Billboard Hot 100 with a novelty record titled “Dueling Tubas.” He opened for Frank Zappa, Randy Newman, Billy Joel and Bruce Springsteen, a strange run of headliners for a man whose act, in Steve Martin’s words, “was completely different from any other. It was bizarre, and I was intimidated.”

He is also one of the people credited with the line that writing about music is like dancing about architecture, which tells you something about how he regarded explanations of his own work.

Television is where the lineage gets interesting. Norman Lear’s Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, the late-night soap parody that played its absurd plots with a straight face, cast Mull as Garth Gimble and then brought him back as Garth’s twin brother, Barth. Barth got a spin-off of his own, Fernwood 2 Night, a fake local talk show from a fictional Ohio town with Willard as the eager sidekick; it later relocated to a fictional California town as America 2-Night. Watched now, it reads like an early draft of the talk show as a stage for the host’s vanity, the seam that The Larry Sanders Show, Between Two Ferns and The Colbert Report would mine decades later. Mull then crossed over to the genuine article. In the trailer, Patton Oswalt points out that he guest-hosted The Tonight Show more than 30 times.

The second half of the career is the one most viewers know without knowing the name. He was Colonel Mustard in Clue, a supporting face in Mr. Mom, Mrs. Doubtfire and Jingle All the Way. On Roseanne he played Leon Carp, the heroine’s openly gay boss, across 46 episodes, at a time when a network sitcom rarely gave such a character a permanent place in the ensemble. Sabrina the Teenage Witch made him Principal Willard Kraft for a younger audience. Arrested Development turned him into Gene Parmesan, a private investigator whose flimsy disguises fooled nobody, and Veep earned him an Emmy nomination as a guest actor in his seventies. Few character actors cross that many sitcom generations without becoming a single type, and Mull managed it by never quite committing to one.

What Netflix’s own description places at the end of the road is the thing he kept apart from all of that: the reinvention runs “from smoky folk clubs to primetime sitcoms to gallery walls.” His paintings, a mix of photorealism, pop art and collage, are in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Modern Art. He had his first solo show at a Los Angeles gallery and published a book of his work, Paintings, Drawings and Words. “In my heart, there was a great divide between that which I did to put a roof over our heads and my painting,” he said. That sentence explains the film’s title better than any logline. The comedy paid the mortgage. The canvas was the job.

Documentaries about comedians have become a small genre of their own on streaming, and Who Is Martin Mull? arrives with close relatives. Morgan Neville, one of its executive producers, directed STEVE! (martin), the two-part portrait of the same Steve Martin who appears here. Judd Apatow drew The Zen Diaries of Garry Shandling from a comic’s private journals. Berkeley himself made Beauty Is Embarrassing about Wayne White, the Pee-wee’s Playhouse designer and puppeteer who became better known for his paintings, which makes him a natural fit for a subject with the same split between a television day job and the studio.

What sets this one apart is who is asking the questions. Saget was known to most of the world as the father on Full House and to other comics as one of the bluest stand-ups of his generation, and here he appears on camera doing something neither audience saw much of: interviewing another comedian at length. The executive producer credits add Kevin S. Bright, an executive producer on Friends, and Caitrin Rogers, while the production company, Funny Story Productions, carried the project through eight years and two deaths before it found its way to Netflix. The streamer is releasing it as one of four comedy documentaries on its October slate.

The synopsis promises something “witty, honest and life-affirming,” and it ends on a line of Mull’s: he “had a hell of a ride.” The trailer suggests the film knows where the tension is. Its subject answered questions with jokes, and its interviewer was a comedian who knew exactly how that works.

That leaves the question in the title where Mull left it. In the trailer, Saget offers him a label and Mull turns it into a pun. Berkeley, the friends and the archive can lay out the folk clubs, the talk shows, the sitcoms and the canvases side by side, but whether Martin Mull was a comedian who painted or a painter who happened to be funny for a living is the one thing the man himself never settled, and no one left behind can settle it for him.

What to know before pressing play

Is it a series or a film? Who Is Martin Mull? is a single feature documentary of 94 minutes, not a docuseries.

When and where can I watch it? On Netflix, worldwide, from October 7, 2026.

Who directed it? Neil Berkeley and Bob Saget. Saget began the project in 2018 and worked on it until his death in January 2022; Berkeley completed it.

Black-and-white archive photo of a young Martin Mull playing guitar on stage with a fiddler and a banjo player — Archive image from Who Is Martin Mull? Photo: Netflix

Who appears in it? Martin Mull, through the interviews he gave Saget, alongside Steve Martin, Tom Waits, David Alan Grier, Patton Oswalt and Fred Willard.

When did Martin Mull die? Mull died on June 27, 2024, in Los Angeles, at 80, after a long illness. His daughter, Maggie Mull, announced his death.