Brow Beat

Key & Peele Is Ending After This Season

Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele speak onstage at the 66th Annual Primetime Emmy Awards.

Photo by Kevin Winter/Getty Images

All good shows must come to an end, and Key & Peele, a very, very good show, is no exception: Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele announced Saturday that the show’s current season, its fifth, will be its last, as the duo has mutually decided to pursue other projects. Here’s Key’s explanation, as told to The Wrap:

This is our final season – and it’s not because of Comedy Central, it’s us. It was just time for us to explore other things, together and apart. I compare it to Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor. We might make a movie and then do our own thing for three years and then come back and do another movie.

As that quote makes clear, this isn’t really the end of Key and Peele, comedy duo—just the end of their sketch show, which since 2012 has been subverting stereotypes, lampooning racial tensions, and generally supplying some of the most robust and surreal comedy around. The show became especially popular in recent years: It nabbed a Peabody Award in 2013, eight Emmy nominations this year, and in April one of Key’s best characters, Anger Translator Luther, made an appearance at the White House Correspondents Dinner. There are eight episodes left in the current season, all of which have been filmed, so it makes sense for the two to leave voluntarily, with a legacy to be proud of, and with plenty of future collaborations in store. 

Those collaborations don’t sound half-bad, either. The pair has already written and shot Keanu—a movie in which they play friends attempting to rescue a kitten from the drug underworld—and they’re at work on a Police Academy reboot, a horror film Peele wrote, and an entirely new show that may air on Comedy Central.