Showtime’s late-night show Desus and Mero will not return for a fifth season, the network announced Monday.
The show’s hosts, Desus Nice (aka Daniel Baker) and Kid Mero (aka Joel Martinez), interviewed former President Barack Obama and collaborated on projects including a podcast and a book, but are now “pursuing separate creative endeavors moving forward.” , a Showtime representative said in an emailed statement.
“Desus Nice and Kid Mero have made a name for themselves in the comedy and late-night space as witty cultural commentators,” the statement said.
After the announcement, Desus tweeted that he was “proud of the show my staff put on every episode” and hinted that there were more projects on the way.
Before Showtime picked up “Desus and Mero” in 2018, the show aired on Viceland for two years. The duo, who both grew up in the Bronx, also hosted a long-running podcast, “Bodega Boys.”
The television series overturned the traditional model for late-night talk shows, with the hosts sitting in chairs next to their guests rather than locked behind a desk. They traded carefully crafted opening monologues for a freer conversational style where they responded to news events and viral clips, building on each other’s jokes.
The Showtime show’s fourth season premiered in March with an interview with Denzel Washington that highlighted Desus and Mero’s ability to extract candid personal insights from celebrities and politicians in interviews that felt more like conversations. The two spoke to the Academy Award-winning actor, who grew up in Mount Vernon, NY, about the various stops on the No. 2 of subway and the rising price of a slice of pizza.
Before Desus and Mero became a comedy duo, they each built a following on Twitter, where they occasionally interacted by joking 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 officially brought them together. That meeting led to a podcast called “Desus vs. Mero,” which premiered in 2013, then a web series.
After leaving the Complex, they started the “Bodega Boys” podcast. In 2020, they published an advice book, God-Level Arrows of Knowledge: Life Lessons from the Bronx.
Fans, known as the “Bodega Hive,” had speculated that the end of the comic partnership could be near after the podcast stopped posting new episodes; the last one rose in November. Answering it a series of tweets appearing to confirm that the podcast had ended, Desus said last week that their fans “deserved better than this ending”.
