Desus Nice and the Kid Mero make their Showtime debut. And Spike Lee’s “School Daze” is on BET.

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DESUS & MERO 11 p.m. on Showtime. How do you take a scrappy late-night series hosted by a couple of Bronx pop culture aficionados and size it up for premium cable? The answer, according to Desus Nice and the Kid Mero (the stage names of Daniel Baker and Joel Martinez), is gently. “You don’t mess up the recipe if it’s working,” Desus recently told The New York Times. The pair amassed a following through a free-flowing talk show on Viceland; before it ended last summer, it distinguished itself from other late-night shows through a lack of structure, with episodes that tended to feel like extended hangouts with Desus and Mero; there were no traditional opening monologues. The new show endeavors to take that same structure (or lack thereof) and use premium cable resources to bring in guests like Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the pair’s first big interview on the new show (and a fellow Bronx native).

SCHOOL DAZE (1988) 5:40 p.m. on BET. A question that will hang heavily over the Academy Awards on Sunday is whether Spike Lee will win a directing Oscar after being nominated, for the first time, for “BlacKkKLansman,” his 21st nondocumentary feature. His second, the musical-comedy “School Daze,” came out between his classics “She’s Gotta Have It” and “Do the Right Thing.” It paints a scathing portrait of a fictitious all-black college whose population is divided between members of fraternities and sororities and everybody else. Laurence Fishburne plays a student political organizer; the ensemble also includes Lee and his frequent collaborator Giancarlo Esposito.

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