LOS ANGELES _ Showtime executives knew when they added a late-night talk show to the premium channel's lineup, it would have to be something different. Showtime Entertainment Co-President Gary Levine explains the search took time because "we never want to mimic shows that are on other networks."
They found what they were looking for with Desus Nice and The Kid Mero, who have hosted chat programs for the cable channel Viceland and online. The New York natives will bring their freeform and unique style of interviews to "Desus & Mero," debuting Thursday.
Nice, whose real name is Daniel Baker, is a Jamaican-American comedian who was born in the Bronx. The Kid Mero, whose real name is Joel Martinez, is a Dominican-American writer, comedian, TV personality, voice actor and music blogger.
"These guys are authentic, surprising, funny, hip, and perceptive," says Levine. "They can talk politics with politicians, they can talk ball with ballers, they can swap stories with the stars, but they are always singular, always real and always funny."
The weekly half-hour series will have the duo speaking off the cuff and chatting with guests from the worlds of pop culture, sports, music and politics. They don't do a lot of preparation beforehand to keep the program fresh. They have discovered it is best they are learning about the guest for the first time so the audience will learn with them.
They also will go out of their way to keep the guest from falling back on the preplanned talking points to promote their movie, TV show, book or other projects.
"I don't want you to do the same interview you did on another show when you come to our show," says Nice. "We want to hear something about an old job you had or some childhood experience, something that you haven't told on another show. And that's what we try to get in every interview we do.
"Because the way we work, right away, people either gel with us or don't. And, generally, people know we're friendly guys. People let down their guards, and people feel very open around us."
The reason they avoid letting the guests spend a lot of time promoting is they feel that turns their program into an advertisement.
Along with making the interviews different, Nice and Mero always look to book the most interesting guests possible. In previous incarnations of their talk show, guests have included The Lox, Ebro, Al Sharpton, Gary Owen, Jeezy and Whitney Cummings. The pair admit many guests on their show didn't know who they were, but their casual style helped get them past any awkwardness.
Getting to the point where they started co-hosting a talk show took years. The pair met while attending summer school in New York. Nice is quick to explain they were attending the summer classes because the classrooms were air-conditioned. Ten years later they reconnected through Twitter and soon they were working together.
The move to Showtime will be a change for the pair because in the previous versions of their show, they were able to concentrate on people, places and things connected to New York. Showtime is giving them a much broader forum.
That doesn't worry the hosts.
"Someone told us a long time ago that we're too New York centric to ever appeal to the Midwest, which is one of the most ridiculous things I've ever heard," says Nice. "Part of our appeal is that we are so New York. And it's not the kind of thing, 'Well, like, yo, dumb it down.' People want to see this. They want the authenticity. They want us mispronouncing things."
"The similarities (are) what brings people to it. Even if you don't understand what we're saying, you watch it because you're like, 'I want to understand it. I like these guys. What are they talking about? What do these words mean?' We show stuff on our show from the Bronx local news, which really should not be going national. But so much wild stuff happens in the Bronx that it is national news when we show it."
