The hilarious banter between four friends brought millions of followers to “The Kevin Langue Show” on YouTube and TikTok every Saturday. But just as the comedy game show reached new heights with a Netflix partnership, behind-the-scenes drama that spilled into public view made fans second-guess their support.
The shakeup is drawing comparisons to the dating series “Pop the Balloon or Find Love,” which built a huge following on social media but was canceled after eight episodes on Netflix.
Kevin Langue had posted videos on Vine and YouTube for years before finding his niche with “The Kevin Langue Show.” Since the show’s debut, millions of viewers have tuned in each week to watch Langue, who’s Senegalese, and his panel — which included three friends who are also Black and a special guest — as they worked together to guess which contestants were the odd ones out, including picking out the five secret adults among a group of 20 people.
The friends’ antics and relentless roasts are what attracted fans to this particular group of guessers: While they discussed each contestant’s responses and narrowed down the moles, they slipped in jokes about the size of Aaron Branch’s forehead and Denny Love’s short height. In one episode, as they tried to find Herman Wrice a date, a contestant in a green morphsuit was revealed to be Love’s mom.
But after Langue announced in the comments of a video that the upcoming season would have a rotating panel, fans had questions: What did that mean for Langue’s usual Black panelists? Later that day, the fandom noticed the trio had unfollowed Langue on social media. But if anyone thought the move was part of a bit, notes exchanged between Langue and the panelists soon revealed the tension was no joke.
“Sadly, we haven’t been involved in the show for some time now,” Wrice, Branch and Love wrote in a note to fans. “… Anything featuring us from this point on was filmed a while ago.”
In a response, Langue stated he hadn’t heard from the men directly since last month and was “in the dark” about why his friends left the show.
“Last we spoke, you told me that you were ‘super excited’ for this next chapter, but then just days before our planned production day, we received an email from random attorneys representing the three of you, threatening to hold our film day hostage and saying you weren’t going to come film unless your contracts were renegotiated,” he wrote to them. “That was the first time I was told there was even a problem.”
Wrice, Branch and Love pushed back on Langue’s characterization of the situation in an Instagram post the next day, saying they “were blindsided by a gigantic Netflix deal and were not given much of a heads-up. … Everything business-wise Kevin insists goes through his lawyer. He had kept this Netflix deal a secret. We found out right before the announcement.”
The public feud and panel switchup shocked fans, with many lamenting the demise of their Saturday rituals. The friends’ strong bond was what made the show stand out, they said, with one commenter pointing out that all three occasionally brought loved ones onto the show.
Langue’s “probably hoping to build something on a level like Hot Ones but it won’t work because the stars of the show were DAH [Denny, Aaron and Herman]. We were never tuning in to see Kevin host,” one Redditor wrote.
Without Langue’s usual panelists, many are posting videos mourning what they consider the end of “The Kevin Langue Show.” “We didn’t know it then, but it was all in a day’s work for the last time,” one TikToker captioned a video. “When they think I’m being dramatic about the KLS breakup,” another clip read.
But don’t cry for Langue’s panelists. They’ve already found a soft place to land. The trio’s brand new YouTube channel, “Saturday Morning Detention,” has already amassed over 250,000 subscribers.
In recent years, Netflix has partnered with YouTube and TikTok-native content creators to lure audiences. And it makes sense: Black consumers are particularly devoted to their favorite content creators, according to research provided by Nielsen’s Vice President of Inclusive Insights, Charlene Polite Corley.
A Nielsen study on Black audiences found that Black viewers stream on YouTube more than any other platform, including Netflix. The research also found that 60 percent of Black audiences said they’re more likely to watch a show or movie because one of their favorite content creators is in it, a slightly higher proportion than for audiences as a whole.
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