“You feel the need to be entertaining, and before you know it, you doing dumb shit you normally wouldn’t do,” said the rapper-actor of halting E!’s “Ice Loves Coco” after three seasons.
Ice-T is officially done with “Ice Loves Coco.”
The rapper-actor announced on Tuesday via his podcast that he and his wife, Coco Austin, are currently developing a talk show with Ryan Seacrest Productions.
“We stopped the ‘Ice Loves Coco’ show to move to another show — we have another show in the works with Ryan Seacrest,” he noted on the third episode of “Ice-T: Final Level,” co-hosted with Mick Benzo. “It’s, well, let’s say it’s more of a talk-show setting. That’s all I can say right now… We have done a deal with Ryan Seacrest Productions to put a new show out.”
He explained that the E! show was supposed to feel like a modern version of “I Love Lucy!,” an idea that took him a long time to come around to. He initially told producers, “I’m not doing no dumb shit, we don’t throw drinks in each other’s faces,” as he compared it to the hottest reality show at the time, MTV’s Jersey Shore.
However, after letting audiences follow as Ice filmed “Law & Order: SVU” in New York City and Coco starred in Planet Hollywood’s “Peep Show” in Las Vegas, he felt the couple had reached a plateau within the series. “The reason we cut the Ice Loves Coco show is because reality TV, you can only do so much with reality TV — when you’re doing reality television, at some point, you start to loop,” he said. “People who watch ‘Ice Loves Coco,’ you get it: I play video games, I eat sausage sandwiches, Max and Spartacus are running around the house, Coco has a lot of ideas… Producers will start saying, ‘Well, let’s put Ice on a horse.’ We had done pretty much everything we could do, so me being in the business for 25 years, I said, ‘Let’s switch reels.'”
He looks forward to launching a talk show with Coco, much like his podcast with Benzo, also because of the finite nature of the format. “I think trying to use your life to entertain people is a slippery slope, because I don’t care who you are, your life becomes boring sometimes. Sometimes you just want a bowl of cereal! … You got cameras, they looking at you, you feel the need to be entertaining, and before you know it, you doing dumb shit you normally wouldn’t do.”
Still, he is thankful for being able to introduce Coco and their lives to the public. “Three seasons — no arguments, no fights, no disrespecting each other, and it was a hit,” he said. “People didn’t think you could do reality shows that were positive.”
Listen to Ice-T’s announcement in the podcast below (the segment begins at 24:45):