Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Kevin Hart: Reality Check’ On Peacock, The Star Checks Himself Before He Wrecks Himself

For his eighth stand-up special, and first in three years, Kevin Hart headed to Las Vegas to film at Resort World, and the comedian also goes all-in on Peacock, leaving Netflix behind for whatever jackpot NBCUniversal offered him. Will he keep his cards close to his vest, so to speak, or will he show us what kind of hand life is dealing for him now?

KEVIN HART: REALITY CHECK: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Kevin Hart jumped from Comedy Central to concert films to arenas and stadiums, before the pandemic brought him much closer to home (making his 2020 Netflix special appear as though he filmed it in his actual living room). But now that he’s back out on the road, Hart wants to let us in on how he feels about plastic surgery, his late dad’s penchant for mean nicknames, and how he’s neither as good of a friend or as good of an activist as he’d like to think he is.

What Comedy Specials Will It Remind You Of?: Both Kevin Hart and Tom Segura have specials out this week where they stop not only to mention their dads had died, but also to celebrate their fathers. Albeit in drastically different ways.

Memorable Jokes: Have you ever looked at an ant up close and thought: Brazilian Butt Lift? You will now, after watching Hart describe some of the absurd lengths people are going to to nowadays to get plastic surgery. The comedian may poke fun at LeBron James for his receding hairline, but Hart saves the best jokes to mock himself, acting out how foolish he’d look if he took people’s suggestions to undergo surgery to make himself taller.

Hart has mined his father’s behavior for comedy gold in previous specials, and now that his dad has died (apparently from COPD), the comedian pays tribute to him one last time by remembering some of the great yet mean-spirited nicknames his dad gave to some of their relatives.

The second half of the hour is devoted to the comedian providing himself with the titular reality checks.

He worries about passing down bad habits to his sons. His ego feels deflated when his wife compares him to Gollum; even more so when he sees some the fan art that’s sent his way (and which he displays on the giant screens). At 43, he no longer can drink like he used to, and yet, even if he blacks out, he claims his friends will “Weekend at Bernie’s” him to various nightclubs. Why? “They need my face to get into places.”

It’s not all about him, tho.

Instead of divulging exactly what went awry when his friends pulled him away from going LIVE on social media, Hart decides to recount for us a viral video about gross encounter of the poop-throwing kind at a coffee shop, and then imagine being an innocent bystander caught in the shitstorm at 7 in the morning.

But the more colorful and electric stories do involve Hart getting in over his head, whether it’s on a vacation with his friends that might get busted due to drugs, or whether it’s his wanting to join a celebrity-filled Black Lives Matter protest at the memorial for George Floyd.

Our Take: Kev puts a lot of thought into the flow of his sets.

That said, the timing for some of these bits already somehow feel outdated. Walking onstage with a baseball bat to threaten any fans who might want to bound onstage (was that Dave Chappelle incident at the Hollywood Bowl only 14 months ago?!?) or sharing his take on Will Smith’s Oscars outburst. Or even a joke about the metaverse, which is that even a thing, still?

Hart jokes that we live in crazy times, and it certainly feels crazy to think of how fast the cultural conversation keeps shifting, that some of these premises can somehow go stale so soon.

But that’s not his fault, necessarily. They were fine enough when he delivered the jokes to that audience.

What saves Hart and always has is his affability, and his proclivity for putting himself into situations where he has to squirm and hope to talk his way out of them. It doesn’t take much to picture him with his Plastic Cup Boyz caught up with foreign law enforcement, and imagine how Hart might try to separate himself from the pack. Or when he describes himself feeling out of place with other celebrities at the George Floyd memorial, somehow at a loss for words, but still managing to say a lot anyhow.

After all, those are the kinds of qualities and situations that have made him a movie star.

Our Call: STREAM IT. It’s not my favorite Hart special, but not my least favorite, either. It’ll certainly give a lot of people a new reason to check out Peacock.

Sean L. McCarthy works the comedy beat. He also podcasts half-hour episodes with comedians revealing origin stories: The Comic’s Comic Presents Last Things First.