They’ve only been on Showtime for just three months, but Desus Nice and The Kid Mero — hosts of the late-night comedy show Desus & Mero — are feeling very comfortable in their new home. The transition from four nights a week on the much smaller Viceland to twice a week on premium cable has been “great,” says Mero. “You’re scaling up a lot in terms of production value and staff and people around you and the infrastructure, and I feel like we just are hitting that groove really well the past couple of episodes.”
Not that there haven’t been some adjustments: The audience now sits closer to the hosts, camera angles were adjusted, and some of the interviews now take place at a separate studio. “It’s fluid, and it can just change,” says Desus. “If we see something and we don’t like it, boom, we just change it next week. We don’t have to go through a million meetings to do it.”
But the biggest change to date on Showtime’s Desus & Mero was literally cosmetic. “Our beards changed dramatically from the first episode,” notes Mero with a belly laugh. In the premiere, “Ninety percent of the Showtime budget went towards darkening our beards,” says Desus. “We just looked absolutely ridiculous.”
When pressed for more details about #beardgate, Desus and Mero do what they do best: Riff. “You know how Game of Thrones was too dark? It was like it was our faces were two shadows,” jokes Desus. “It was like, ‘Is my face the Battle of Winterfell? What’s going on?’” Mero adds that their overly-darkened beards made them look “unlockable characters” in a video game, “with a question mark over our faces.”
To hear more with Desus and Mero — including how they convinced Showtime to air their show twice a week, and which presidential candidates they hope to interview next for their Home Turf series — listen to the full episode below. (The interview begins at 30:40.) You can also listen and subscribe to EW’s Best of Shows podcast via Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Radio.com, or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes are available every Monday morning. Tweet counterarguments to @KristenGBaldwin or @DarrenFranich.
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