Initially, the plan was for Lathan and The Ringer’s Mallory Rubin to host the show together: “The original thing was, Mallory was going to do her thing; I was gonna do some stuff. But the reality of it was that we were covering stuff with a rotating cast of people,” Lathan says. “I’m not trying to diss nobody, but it wasn’t really, at least on my side, something that seemed like it was gonna be recreatable.”

So the plan shifted. At the time, Holmes was primarily working on music-related content for the website—but he’d already worked with Lathan on a podcast covering WandaVision. The higher-ups proposed Holmes as a permanent cohost, while Rubin went off to cohost another Ringer show, House of R.

In the beginning, the unnamed Lathan-Holmes show was intended to fill a specific vacuum, providing instant reactions to things like the latest superhero-movie trailer or the newest episode of The Mandalorian, which often dropped at midnight. That mandate is what inspired the podcast’s name. Over time, though, its scope expanded. The Midnight Boys eventually filled out its host chairs with Adeniran, a Marvel expert who got his start at The Ringer making social content, and Ahlman, the show’s producer, whose takes were too good to stay behind the scenes. The show really hit its groove in an episode where its hosts imagined an NFL-style draft for “Black heroes of fandom.” Ahlman chose Geordi La Forge, the Star Trek character played by LeVar Burton, as a second-round draft pick, triggering a passionate debate.

As the show’s purview shifted, its hosts began to draw unexpected connections that let them tackle culture in a new way. It may seem odd to discuss the anime film Demon Slayer in the same breath as Paul Thomas Anderson’s eventual Oscar winner, One Battle After Another. “But those are two movies that came out that were dominating culture,” says Holmes. “So it’s like, Hey, if we’re arguing about this before we get on mic, that’s an episode.”