The creators of the sitcom South Side and the IFC sketch show Sherman’s Showcase, Diallo Riddle and Bashir Salahuddin, have inked a long-term development deal with Warner Bros TV, Deadline reports. The duo “looks forward to creating everything from broadcast sitcoms to daring streaming content,” according to Deadline.
This overall deal is the latest update from the creative team of Riddle and Salahuddin. In June, it was confirmed that the second season of Sherman’s Showcase would air in 2021 on IFC with an accompanying AMC simulcast, as reported by Deadline. The show’s hour-long “Black History Month Spectacular” came out on June 19th, and can be viewed in its entirety on Hulu. In August, HBO Max agreed to make the upcoming second season of South Side “Max Original” exclusive to the platform, via TV Line. The first season was broadcast on Comedy Central back in 2019 and will reportedly be available to stream on HBO Max next year, according to TV Line.
Diallo Riddle and Bashir Salahuddin met while they were both attending Harvard University. According to an interview with Chilled, Riddle was pursuing History major at the time. Salahuddin, meanwhile, had enrolled in the college’s premed program, per a Chicago profile. On February 6th, 2007, they uploaded a comedy music video to YouTube called “Condi Rice Raps” that attracted wealth of media buzz, via Chicago. Riddle and Salahuddin’s first television writing credits came shortly after the video’s release. They were tapped to write for Comedy Central’s short-lived satirical news program Chocolate News. They followed that up with a few years in the writer’s room at Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, where they conceived the music-themed recurring bits “Slow Jam the News” and “History of Rap.” Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson and Tariq “Black Thought” Trotter from Fallon‘s house band The Roots appear in an animated parody of A Charlie Brown Christmas during the Sherman’s Showcase “Black History Month Spectacular.”
Riddle and Salahuddin’s collaboration has also yielded South Side Stories, a non-fiction podcast that details the real-life personages and locales that have inspired South Side. It is co-produced by Chicago’s non-commercial radio station WBEZ. All nine episodes are free to stream on the official WBEZ website.
Bashir Salahuddin can currently be seen acting in Kevin Willmott’s historical drama film The 24th, and will play opposite Tom Cruise in the long-awaited action film Top Gun: Maverick, scheduled to come out next summer, as reported by Variety.