Laugh Out Loud Network Renews Kevin Hart Talk Show for Second Season

Things are about to get even icier for Kevin Hart. The comedian’s Laugh Out Loud network has renewed breakout series Cold As Balls for another two seasons.

Produced by OBB Pictures, Cold As Balls is a talk show with an unusual twist: Hart interviews all of his subjects, primarily professional athletes and people connected to the sports world, while they take ice baths. The first season debuted Feb. 8 and has featured interviews with Olympic gymnast Gabby Douglas, Detroit pistons power forward Blake Griffin and basketball dad LaVar Ball.

Since its launch, Cold As Balls has become the most-watched show on Hart’s seven-month-old Laugh Out Loud digital network. The first episode, featuring Ball, has 8.2 million views and the series averages more than 5 million views per episode.

Laugh Out Loud president Jeff Clanagan tells The Hollywood Reporter that the series has exceeded expectations, resulting in dozens of calls from reps eager to book their clients for the show.

“This is the first time that Kevin has hosted a talk show,” he explains, adding that because of Hart’s interest in sports, “he has an automatic connection with a lot of the guests that we bring on. He knows how to dig in and ask the unconventional questions.”

OBB founder Michael D. Ratner teases that the two-season order will allow production to get creative with the format — Hart, an athlete and two ice baths — that they created, perhaps exploring interviewing multiple people at once or expanding into “sports adjacent” interview subjects.

“This is Kevin’s Between Two Ferns,” Ratner says of the series. “Given how well people responded to season one, we want to continue on the path of making the show feel bigger and bigger.”

Hart launched Laugh Out Loud in partnership with Lionsgate in August with a lineup of comedy programming including Kevin Hart: Lyft Legend. Other shows include Kevin Hart Collabs and recently launched, YouTube-funded What the Fit. While Cold as Balls debuts on YouTube, where Laugh Out Loud has 1.5 million subscribers, the network is platform agnostic. On Facebook, Laugh Out Loud has built an audience of 4.8 million followers.

Four-year-old OBB has produced a range of film, television and digital projects, including the Netflix documentary One in a Billion and go90 series The 5th Quarter.