With their move from podcast to Showtime (with a stop at Viceland in between), Desus & Mero (a.k.a. The Bodega Boys, a.k.a. Desus Nice and The Kid Mero) continue to pull in stellar guests for their own signature brand of late-night talk. On Thursday’s show, the garrulous and engaging Bronx duo brought in NBA star Carmelo Anthony to talk hoops and Instagram (where Anthony will come for your “glazed donut face ass” if you start some shit), and Us director Jordan Peele, who invited the hosts to his hotel room, perhaps unadvisedly, for a bit.
As a newly crowned Hollywood player, Peele told Desus and Mero that his Monkeypaw Productions has had to clamp down on taking the flood of movie pitches that rolled in after the success of Get Out and Us, but that he’d make an exception for the Bodega Boys in their stated quest to EGOT. (No word on whether the pair have now updated their goals to a PEGOT—damn you, Rita Moreno.) Peele talked seriously for a bit about his vision as a horror director, calling Get Out “the black man’s nightmare,” and calling it “crazy” that simply having a black family at the center of a Us’ wide-ranging horror story is something that he hadn’t seen in the past. Then, playing some expert straight man, Peele sat through Desus and Mero’s proposal for Spooky Bucks, in which two podcasters from the Bronx get a cable talk show and lots of money—but the money is haunted. (“That’s real life, that’s not haunted money,” Peele deadpanned, after Desus explained that the curse would mean, for example, that buying cigarettes with the money would give him cancer.)
Fair enough. But what about a “Baby Shark”-scored Jaws-type franchise? (Hard pass.) We Bought A Bronx Zoo, complete with creepy photoshopped poster with a kid Desus riding shoulders on Kid Mero? (“How did you let this happen?”) Or maybe a Sopranos-styled mashup of The Babadook and a certain New Jersey nightclub. (You get it.) Peele, never far from his comedy roots no matter how many spines he’s currently chilling (his reimagined Twilight Zone premieres on Monday), played along like the jaded industry mogul he’s clearly not yet, although even he couldn’t resist the duo’s pitch for a Back To The Future remake that brings the beloved film’s, um, sexual subtext to the fore. Look for it, America.