beenz
Rap Guerilla
I'm a big viceland fan, but I don't really like this show.
Desus & Mero on VICELAND
- Thread starter dvdjamm
- Start date
zayk35
Superstar
doubled
zayk35
Superstar
its growing on me they had...... Bomani Jones on recently so that's good
His wife might be helping
Idgi, she's helping come off more comfortable on camera?
Notorious 1 E.Y.E.
Superstar
shyt kills me when mero goes extra Dominican
When it came to their earlier on camera stuff (MTV, etc) Mero always seemed like the stronger of two to me. While I felt Desus outshines him on Twitter and podcast.
JulesWinfield
TheBrehdrenMovement
Barmelo Xanthony
:wowat65:
:wowat65:
Roland Coltrane
Superstar
The Men Who Dared To Launch A Late-Night Show In The Middle Of The 2016 Election
Desus Nice and The Kid Mero, two Twitter personalities, are quietly breaking ground on a staid platform — and they’ve done it during the most insane few months in American political history.
posted on Nov. 14, 2016, at 2:24 p.m.
Marcus Jones
BuzzFeed News Reporter
the backlash against Jimmy Fallon for not going hard enough on Trump, to viral clips from Full Frontal host Samantha Bee, Last Week Tonight’s John Oliver, and Late Night’s Seth Meyers who all swung to the other end of the pendulum.
To jump in on that conversation on Oct. 17, less than a month before Decision Day 2016, might seem ballsy for two guys known as Yung Chipotle and the Human Du-rag Flap, Yung Hot Take and Curve Gotti, Your Problematic Bae and the Plantain Supernova in the sky — two guys who, three years ago, were just Twitter personalities notorious for Okayplayer message-board comments and blog posts on Noisey, consistently finding themselves in roundups of the best tweets during any major cultural event.
this sampling from the day after Trump won the election: “Shout out to all the white people that voted for him. Yes, I said y’all. I’m calling y’all out,” Desus said. “Special shout out to white women coming out in droves to not vote for Hillary, but for Mr. Brexit, Mr. Grab ‘Em in their Chocha. … Every time I go past a Lululemon I’m just gonna shake my head.”
“It’s not only that they don’t know what they’re doing, they refuse to do things the way things have been done in the past,” Desus said of Viceland. On other networks, “it’d usually be like get a white guy, give him a suit, get an auditorium, get a band, get three guests, boom. Monologue, interviews, we out,” he added. At Viceland, Mero said, it all starts with them asking, “What do you want to do?”
The answer? Create the most humbled production on late night with the most outspoken hosts.
The format of Desus & Mero is simple: They mostly sit at a graffiti-covered wood paneled desk in that crowded conference room, sometimes with a guest wedged between them (on this day, it’s fellow talk show host Charlamagne Tha God), as producers hold a monitor behind the camera that plays viral videos for them to discuss. There’s a boxing match and a racist white girl, but the conversation jumps from Emmett Till to amputees to “coconut oil for everyone.” The only elements added in post-production are the list of topics that sit in a simple white font on the righthand side of the screen (which came from ESPN-raised Rydholm) and title cards that introduce each topic.
“A lot of other people will spend five million dollars on a set and put a crappy show on it,” said Mero. “Like, the show comes first. The actual content has to come first, and then you build everything around that. … Sometimes we talk about the news, sometimes we talk about Sex in the City and Game of Thrones — it’s whatever.”
A sample of Desus & Mero. Viceland / Via youtube.com
Often during tapings, Rydholm sits in the corner opposite the other producers, taking notes on what lines get the biggest laughs. Meanwhile, their longtime manager Victor Lopez — known to listeners of their podcast, Bodega Boys, simply as Victor — sits on a couch just out of frame, essentially functioning as their human Google. Most of what they say is included in the final cut that airs around 10 hours later at 11:00, but a joke about the owner of a huge dog having a lot of peanut butter jars in the garbage doesn’t.
Even with the pressure of a Monday-through-Thursday night show and a weekly podcast, Desus and Mero (who forgo their given names) have maintained the unfiltered, off-the-cuff quality that brought them tens of thousands of Twitter followers. They’re becoming some of the most thoughtful public figures without losing their edge, which feels like a particular accomplishment in the wake of Donald Trump’s presidential victory. Who else is going to remind people that “crazy” is an ableist slur? “It’s a natural political correctness,” Mero said, something that he attributes to growing up in the Bronx and “being exposed to all these people and getting their feedback.” “We self-censor… just because we are normal people in society, not because you can’t say, or like, we’re scared about damaging the brand. It’s just like, ‘Bro, we’re not being dikkheads.’”
Desus and Mero on the set of their Viceland show. Viceland
Their innate ability to be both polarizing and inclusive, poetic and profane is exactly why Desus and Mero are the perfect candidates to get away with launching a talk show a month before the craziest election our country has seen. And they know being on Viceland has allowed them a certain luxury.
“These dudes are all 70-year-old white guys. They’re just looking at numbers,” Mero said of the executives behind most late-night shows, as opposed to Rydholm, Viceland’s president of programming Nick Weidenfeld, and filmmaker and Viceland co-president Spike Jonze, all of whom are in their thirties and forties.
“If a network believed in the Larry Wilmore show, you wouldn’t dead it right when the election was starting,” Desus said, referring to The Nightly Show, Wilmore’s Daily Showspinoff of sorts that was canceled in August.
“They don’t care about the significance of Larry Wilmore calling Obama his nikka in the way that we call each other our nikka,” Mero noted of Wilmore’s controversial commentsat the 2016 White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner. “That’s a culturally relevant moment.”
And it’s something they hope to emulate. “Shoutout to Larry Wilmore,” Desus added. “He taught me making people uncomfortable in comedy the right way, which is what he was doing. You know you’re touching on something right.”
While Viceland’s Desus & Mero upholds what has made them popular in the first place — rapid fire banter, the most fuego takes, education on the Bronx, etc. — the duo has come a long way from their first video episode of Complex’s Desus vs. Mero in April 2014 where they made news trolling everyone into thinking Desus was white. “It was so funny. I think to this day maybe half the people who’ve tuned in for that first episode was just, ‘I just want to see if he’s white,’” said Desus. “They didn’t care about the show, and maybe they stayed for it… Each episode, more people started rocking with it.”
“We’re like Reese’s Peanut Butter cups,” Desus explained. “Some people like chocolate some people like peanut butter, which is funny because he’s the color of peanut butter, I’m the color of chocolate.”
Victor had signed Mero when he was looking to adapt to the internet age in 2012 by representing digital talent, and Jenna Marbles unfortunately had a manager already. After a year of working together, they accepted an offer from Complex to do a podcast with Desus, who Mero had already been interacting with on Twitter. During the first test podcast, Victor gave Mero a pep talk. “‘OK, Mero, this guy is really good, but let’s beat him,’” he recalled telling his client. “By the third one, I was like, ‘Mero, why don’t you take a seat? I’m going to sign him.’”
FBI Director James Comey sent a letter to Congress about more Hillary Clinton emails.
youtube.com
Unlike comedians like Trevor Noah who are haunted by the ghosts of Twitter past when they get their big break, anything Desus and Mero have said before shouldn’t be a surprise. “It’s very on-brand,” explained Desus. “I think if we didn’t have kind of like questionable characters, backgrounds on Twitter, we probably wouldn’t have the show on Vice. Like, that’s part of the risk. It’s like, ‘Yo, Vice is kind of wylin’ for even attempting this show with us. Who knows what those two are going to say — they’re wild, they’re problematic, but at the same time they’re talented.’ So it helps us.”
That mentality extends to the show as well. “People on Twitter are like, ‘Change this, change this, change this,’” Desus said. His response? “Come to the Viceland office, sit down with Spike Jonze, Nick Weidenfeld, and Erik Rydholm and when they push their Emmys off the desk so they can see your poor face, you tell them what to change on the show they’ve created.”
But in all seriousness, Desus and Mero are finally at a place where they feel fully supported by their employers. “We all say ‘I love you’ a lot around here on some real genuine [level],” Desus said.
Three weeks into Desus & Mero, Desus said everyone involved “knows what we are and what our brand is.” They’re not chasing trends or pitching ideas in an attempt to be viral — it’s not like, as Mero joked, “Let’s do the whole show in Vines.”
“We got here by chance, but we have the talent to stay here.”
“I feel like if you were to come with a stupid idea like that, everyone here would laugh at you because that’s so gimmicky,” said Desus.
“We never paid for sponsored tweets or did anything,” Mero added. “It was just us doing us, and then people latched onto that and us interacting with them built that even stronger, that connection” — a bond they call the #BodegaHive.
“I feel they can prove how far from left field you can come and make an argument to, at the very least, compete on the same terms, which means network television format programming,” Victor said.
Now that they feel like they’re quietly conquering that world, Desus and Mero have their eyes on some interests outside of hosting. “We got here by chance, but we have the talent to stay here. And acting is just another little piece of the apple to cut off and eat,” said Mero. “Also, acting is not that hard. I’mma keep it 100, it’s not that hard.”
“Acting is just lying to your girl in front of mad people,” added Desus.
But from Victor’s perspective, they still have a lot to prove in this current format. “I don’t let them look too far into the future,” he said.
Still for now, they’re ecstatic about making the most of their conference room daily. Since the Viceland show started, Desus said, “I’ve never woken up like, ‘fukk, I gotta go do this show.’ Sometimes it’s 6:30 in the morning, I’m like, ‘Yo, can this fukking car come? I can’t wait. Got jokes on deck. Can’t wait to talk about this.’ Or I’ll see shyt from the night before, like, ‘Yo, tomorrow we’re going to talk about that, I can’t wait.’”
Or, as Mero said more simply, it’s great to go into work every day feeling like, “Yo, it’s gonna be lit!”
verbalkint
I see you niccas...
People really feel like Mero is outshining Desus? As a podcast listener it really feels like Desus is regularly running the point. Can't say I watched too much of their earlier DvM work.
Roland Coltrane
Superstar
they compliment each other well but i've always felt Desus>Mero
Mero plays the straight man if that makes any sense
Heard these dudes on Tax I think and thought they was super Corny and try hard Twitter brehs...
Caught one of they podcasts organically when it played after something I was listening too and brehs had me
Dope af to see they expansion as well.
Smacked cittttyyyyyyyyy
Caught one of they podcasts organically when it played after something I was listening too and brehs had me
Dope af to see they expansion as well.
Smacked cittttyyyyyyyyy
rushing to paris
Rookie
I've listened to every podcast, watched every video, and have seen every episode of the show on VICELAND.
Ranking:
1) Bodega Boys
2) Desus vs. Mero (which is dated by now, but the jokes are still cash)
3) Desus and Mero (VICELAND)
If your first introduction to them is VICELAND, you're getting the filtered, watered down version of their comedy and shenanigans.
Ranking:
1) Bodega Boys
2) Desus vs. Mero (which is dated by now, but the jokes are still cash)
3) Desus and Mero (VICELAND)
If your first introduction to them is VICELAND, you're getting the filtered, watered down version of their comedy and shenanigans.
MikeyC
The Coli Royal Rumble Champion 2019
Yeah. On the podcasts (before the VICELAND money) they used to go HAM. Now, even they acknowledge that they've cleaned up their act a little.
Boolean
APIDTA
Yesterday my moms randomly ask me the Knicks/Giuliani question she been watching the marathon
rather her watch this than the podcasts tho
she been watching the marathon rather her watch this than the podcasts tho