Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Hart To Heart’ On Peacock, Where Kevin Hart Has Freewheeling Conversations With Big Stars

Kevin Hart is always grinding, coming up with new ways to be on our screens at all times. In Hart To Heart (not to be confused with the ’80s detective series Hart To Hart), the comedian is having freewheeling talks with big stars. The idea is that it’s 42 minutes of conversation that hasn’t gone through a pre-interview, and hasn’t been outlined. Hart has no cards, no “topics to hit.” He just wants to have honest conversations with his guests, usually over a big glass of wine (He shoots the show at a winery, or at least what looks like a winery; there are fermenting barrels in the background).

HART TO HEART: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: Kevin Hart, standing in front of a wine rack, saying “We’ve got quite the doozy for you today! Why do I say that? Because that’s what these shows are. They’re doozies. Because our guests are amazing.”

The Gist: There is one guest per episode; the guests in the first batch are Miley Cyrus, Don Cheadle and Kelly Clarkson. In the Miley Cyrus episode, the outspoken singer is a bit cautious at first, given how Hart mentions that the format is open and unplanned. But when he asks her about the process she went through to audition for Hannah Montana when she was a kid, she starts to open up about how her mother and grandmother would drive her from Nashville to Los Angeles and back multiple times for the various callbacks.

Why so many? Because she didn’t get the part at first; she was so confident that she did, though, that she started being super-rebellious at school, figuring she wasn’t there long. She was proud of being the youngest person to get in-school suspension at her middle school (she was 12). Miley’s description of her grandmother — white hair, flaming red eyebrows, driving a lawn mower because her drivers license was revoked — made us want to get to know her.

The two of them move on to how she’s been dealing with isolation during the pandemic, and she says her dad, Billy Ray Cyrus, “has been social distancing since 1992.” Then the two of them go into a long talk about how they’ve changed how they give advice to people looking to be in creative fields, going from the mode of “This is how I became successful and you should do this too,” to being more supportive and realizing that some people don’t want to do what’s needed to get there.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Hart to Heart feels more like a WTF-style podcast than a TV show. It’s a bit of a looser and shaggier version of My Guest Needs No Introduction With David Letterman.

Our Take: We’ve interviewed plenty of people, so we know what Kevin Hart might be thinking as he conducts the interviews on Hart to Heart. He doesn’t have questions in front of him, but we’re sure he’s got topics he wants to hit. Or maybe he just thinks that he can start of with a topic then just let things flow from there. Either way, his desire to just be real and honest and not give canned stories yields a mixed bag, as you might expect.

Of course, when you have a guest who is as forthcoming and funny as Miley Cyrus, you just really need to ask her one question and she’ll take care of the rest. She was hilarious and opened up as she got more comfortable with Hart — and likely had a few sips of red along the way.

But the conversation was also frustrating, because Hart failed to ask her about growing up with a famous father, and why he decided to “social distance” when “Achy Breaky Heart” broke huge (only a few months before she was born). Did he give her any advice? We did appreciate how she felt that at some point, she and the Miley from the show merged, but somehow she doesn’t come away from that part of the experience with bad memories. It was the overscheduling, the stress, and the fact that she couldn’t take it all in that frustrated her the most, especially in retrospect.

Another thing that frustrated us is that, while Hart is looking for a conversation, he has to learn what most journalists know when they interview people: It’s not about him. There’s nothing less interesting to watch than Hart monologuing about something he learned from Will Smith while Cyrus simply listens and nods. We get it, Kevin; you want to impart what you’ve learned about being famous. But we’re more interested in hearing from Cyrus, not from the host monologuing.

Sex and Skin: None.

Parting Shot: “Why do you have elbows? The same reason you have joints. I’m saying once in a while, smoke one,” Hart tells the camera.

Sleeper Star: None.

Most Pilot-y Line: Hart actually has a sommelier come in to pour him and Cyrus the wine selection for the interview. Cyrus was impressed with the “som”‘s dedication to his passion, but it just came off as schtick from Hart.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Hart To Heart is an easy way to spend an hour, with conversation that can be enlightening at times. But Hart needs to get out of his own way and keep his ego in check for the show to really work.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.

Stream Hart To Heart On Peacock