Showtime said that the Bronx-bred hosts were “pursuing separate creative endeavors” after the duo collaborated on television shows, podcasts and a book.
The Showtime late-night talk show “Desus and Mero” will not be returning for a fifth season, the network announced on Monday.
The show’s hosts, Desus Nice (a.k.a. Daniel Baker) and the Kid Mero (a.k.a. Joel Martinez), interviewed former President Barack Obama and collaborated on projects including podcasts and a book, but are now “pursuing separate creative endeavors moving forward,” a Showtime representative said in an emailed statement.
“Desus Nice and the Kid Mero have made a name for themselves in comedy and in the late-night space as quick-witted cultural commentators,” the statement said.
After the announcement, Desus wrote on Twitter that he was “proud of the show my staff made every episode” and hinted he had more projects on the way.
Before Showtime picked up “Desus and Mero” in 2018, the show aired on Viceland for two years. The pair, who both grew up in the Bronx, also hosted a long-running podcast, “Bodega Boys.”
The television series upended the traditional model for late-night talk shows, with the hosts sitting in chairs next to their guests instead of cloistered behind a desk. They swapped carefully crafted opening monologues for a looser conversation style where they responded to news events and viral clips, building on each other’s jokes.
The show’s fourth season on Showtime premiered in March with an interview with Denzel Washington that spotlighted Desus and Mero’s ability to pull candid, personal insights from celebrities and politicians in interviews that felt more like conversations. The two spoke with the Academy Award-winning actor, who grew up in Mount Vernon, N.Y., about different stops on the No. 2 subway line and the rising price of a pizza slice.
Before Desus and Mero became a comedic duo, each had built a following on Twitter, where they would occasionally interact while making jokes about their day jobs and the Bronx.
They had attended the same summer school and were familiar with each other, but it was a meeting they were both invited to by an editor at the pop culture website Complex that formally brought them together. That meeting led to a podcast called “Desus vs. Mero,” that premiered in 2013, then a web series.
After they left Complex, they started the “Bodega Boys” podcast. In 2020, they published an advice book, “God-Level Knowledge Darts: Life Lessons From the Bronx.”
Fans, known as the “Bodega Hive,” had speculated that the end of the comedic partnership could be near after the podcast stopped posting new episodes; the last one went up in November. Responding to a series of tweets that appeared to confirm the podcast had ended, Desus said last week that their fans “deserved better than this ending.”
Source: Television - nytimes.com
