Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Confessions From The Hart,’ On The Roku Channel, Where Kevin Hart Gets Into The NFT Game

How do you celebrate a birthday? Comedian and movie star Kevin Hart turned 43 on Wednesday, and for the occasion, released a new animated special on Roku that’s more designed to sell you NFTs “and Metaverse experiences” than it is to make you laugh. Go figure. 2022 is weird, y’all.

CONFESSIONS FROM THE HART: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: This Roku Original special animates four stories over the course of 27 minutes, each story lifted from Kevin Hart’s Instagram (RIP IGTV) series of the same name.
In conjunction with Hart’s birthday on July 6, 2022, The Roku Channel also packaged the animated special with a free hub called “Hart’s Hits” featuring the comedian’s other short-form content, including  Die Hart, Cold as Balls, Exit Strategy, Straight from the Hart, Real Husbands of Hollywood and more.
Confessions From The Hart also is billed as the first in a series of “Kevin Hart Nation Web3 experiences,” enticing his super fans to buy into Hart’s first-ever NFT collection culled from the various characters in the special. If you’re into all of that. What about the actual special, though?
What Comedy Specials Will It Remind You Of?: Tig Notaro put out an animated stand-up special last year on HBO, Drawn, which drew upon a collection of her old routines.

Memorable Jokes: It’s not a special full of jokes, but rather, stories.
“I’m Ready To Fight For Mines” reimagines what happened on Hart’s private plane when the comedian almost brawled with his personal trainer. As originally seen during the comedian’s 2019 Netflix docuseries, Don’t F**k This Up, Hart’s retelling wants us to know what we didn’t see on camera.
“Fowl Play” opens with a cartoon Hart sitting on a toilet with a can of air freshener, as he recounts the time he suffered from food poisoning while on tour in Scandinavia, and his unfortunate dilemma while trying to finish a performance before he soiled himself.
“I Eat Pepper Spray” takes us back to 2003, when a not-yet-famous Hart was opening for his friend and mentor, Keith Robinson, and their interaction with the police after a traffic stop.
“A Sticky Situation” dishes on the time Hart accidentally spilled pineapple juice on Beyonce while trying to make himself a drink in the VIP section of a club during NBA All-Star Weekend in Houston.
Our Take: The computer animation resembles bobbleheads as much as anything else, but perhaps that’s more conducive to NFTs? I don’t know.
I found it curious that the animators at times obviously distanced themselves from corporate tie-ins, while in other scenes, leaned into branding opportunities. Which only makes this feel even more like a business decision and less like a comedy special.
Because if you’re clicking for the comedy, you won’t find much here. Hart may have a tremendously charismatic stage presence and engaging storytelling style, but none of that makes it into this project. Did Hart not want to redo his Instagram voiceover narration for Roku?
We hear him say “I got tons of gems” but all we hear is the rough covering up those diamonds.
It forces the animation to do all of the heavy comedic lifting. It’s only truly successful during the Keith Robinson story, imagining Robinson as a senior citizen and then as a pimp, as he’s calling out the police officers surrounding their car. The animators add their own flair to the final story, imagining Snoop Dogg and Martha Stewart coming to Hart’s aid in the nightclub.

Our Call: SKIP IT. There’s potential in this series, but this pilot episode should have gone back into redevelopment before making it to air.

Sean L. McCarthy works the comedy beat for his own digital newspaper, The Comic’s Comic; before that, for actual newspapers. Based in NYC but will travel anywhere for the scoop: Ice cream or news. He also tweets @thecomicscomic and podcasts half-hour episodes with comedians revealing origin stories: The Comic’s Comic Presents Last Things First.

Watch Confessions From The Hart on The Roku Channel