The Rundown: Desus And Mero Are The Best And They Did Something Really Cool This Week

The Rundown is a weekly column that highlights some of the biggest, weirdest, and most notable events of the week in entertainment. The number of items could vary, as could the subject matter. It will not always make a ton of sense. Some items might not even be about entertainment, to be honest, or from this week. The important thing is that it’s Friday, and we are here to have some fun.

Few things in the world of television have brought me as much joy as the rise of Desus and Mero. Their story is so cool. They were a couple of dudes with regular day jobs who were funny on Twitter, and they turned that into a podcast, and they turned that podcast into television gigs, and they turned those television gigs into their own television show on Vice, and they turned that show into a big deal television show on Showtime. They interviewed Obama a little while ago. It is really wild to see two guys you started listening to on a podcast years ago getting roasted by a former president on a premium cable network. I love it.

I also love that they love it and seem committed to doing awesome and/or hilarious stuff with their big new platform. Their show is such a blast. Huge chunks of it are them just cracking jokes about the news and talking junk about people who deserve to have junk talked about them, and other chunks of the show are spent interviewing or doing stuff with celebrities. They’ve spoken to AOC. They took Anna Kendrick to the Bronx. They had Letterman on and he more or less anointed them as the next kings of late night. It rules. It’s exactly what you should do if you get a shot at fame after years of working a regular job. I hope they start popping up in movies as themselves all the time now, like how the guys from PTI play themselves in sports movies sometimes.

I say all of this now for two main reasons: One, because it is true and someone should say it; two, because they did something really cool this week, and talking about it gave me an excuse to write that two-paragraph intro about how good they are. Please take a few minutes at some point today or this weekend to watch this video. It is very funny and very sweet and just really cool.

The gist of it goes like this: Desus and Mero take over a fifth-grade class from St. Charles Borromeo Catholic School in Harlem. They do it for the jokes, in part, because giving children a live microphone on television is almost always good for a laugh or two. But they also do it to highlight the work the teacher, David Robles, is doing during an impossible time to make school fun and interesting for kids who are stuck inside and attending school via Zoom from their living rooms.

Watch it all the way to the end. Watch the kids say some really nice things about their teacher. Feel your heart grow about two or three sizes when you see the difference this is making for kids who are just barely old enough to understand what is happening in the world but not old enough to do anything about it on their own yet. And then watch as one of the kids, after hearing that Desus and Mero are sending everyone a new pair of sneakers, shout out that he wants Yeezys. I like that kid. Shoot the shot when you’re open, you know

Anyway, again, all of this is great. I’m glad they did it and I’m glad they’re very famous now and I’m glad I have a little space on the internet to ramble about it. The brand is strong, as always.

Good news and bad news. Bad news first because I can put enough English on it to spin it straight into the good news: The ninth Fast & Furious movie, the one that was supposed to come out last year, the one that released its trailer over 13 months ago now, the one that revealed that Han — a character who died in the third movie but appeared in films 4-6 thanks to the franchise turning itself into a chronological pretzel — is either alive or has been replaced by a person/robot/hologram who looks exactly like Han, the one in which Charlize Theron has a bowl cut and a magnet plane, the one that apparently introduces John Cena as Vin Diesel’s evil secret brother and may or may not send its characters into outer space, has been delayed yet again.

F9, which was slated to debut over Memorial Day weekend, has pushed back its release date once again. But fear not, adrenaline junkies: the high-octane sequel hasn’t spun too far out; it’s still expected to open this summer on June 25.

So there’s that. It’s a bummer because I want to see this movie as soon as possible. I want to have seen it. I want it to be done with its theatrical run and airing on basic cable already. But I’ve waited this long, and if one more month increases the chance I can see it safely inside a movie theater, then fine. This brings us to the good news.

The sequel to Venom, the terrifically titled Venom: Let There Be Carnage, also comes out on June 25. Couple this information with the fact that there will apparently be enough vaccines available for every American adult by the end of May, and we are — if we can stay reasonably careful and vigilant about all of this a little longer — looking at a future where we can see both of these movies… in a theater… on the same weekend. We could even do it on the same day. Think about that. Think about going to a movie theater and buying all the candy and soda you can carry and seeing an F9/Venom double bill on a Saturday. Doesn’t that sound wonderful

Well, it does to me. Stick me with all the vaccines you got and then shove images of Vin Diesel and Tom Hardy into my eyeballs. This is not a sentence I expected to type as recently as 13ish months ago, back when the F9 trailer dropped, but now it is all I want in the entire world.