Kevin Hart’s Cold as Balls Returns to Netflix Today With Serena Williams and IShowSpeed

LOS ANGELES — Thirteen seasons is a long time to sit in an ice bath, and Kevin Hart has done it every time.

Cold as Balls, Kevin Hart’s interview franchise, has run since 2018—first on YouTube’s Laugh Out Loud Network and later on Netflix. Its 13th season arrives today, with all seven episodes released simultaneously.

The format remains unchanged: Hart and a guest sit in adjacent ice baths as the temperature drops, their defenses loosen, and the conversation moves into territory that might never emerge from a traditional studio interview.

What has evolved, increasingly, is the guest list.

Season 13 features Serena Williams, Novak Djokovic, Cooper Flagg, Rob Gronkowski, Sean O’Malley, Zlatan Ibrahimović, and internet personality IShowSpeed—the broadest range of cultural worlds the series has assembled in one season.

Williams represents one end of that spectrum: a 23-time Grand Slam champion whose fame extends far beyond tennis and who is now navigating the visibility that follows retirement from a sport she defined for two decades.

IShowSpeed represents the other: a gaming and lifestyle creator whose audience of tens of millions exists largely within the YouTube, Twitch, and TikTok ecosystem, separate from the traditional entertainment press and awards cycles that have historically validated mainstream celebrity.

That the two appear in the same season, on the same platform, under the same ice-bath interview format, is not accidental. It is the argument Season 13 is making about where celebrity lives in 2026, and which categories still meaningfully separate sports fame from internet fame from entertainment fame.

Djokovic’s inclusion was the last piece confirmed publicly. When Netflix announced the season in August, six guests were named. The seventh episode, featuring Djokovic, was added separately in late August as the premiere approached. Djokovic, 39, has maintained a more guarded relationship with entertainment media than most of his contemporaries at the top of professional tennis. The cold tub for comedy purposes on a major streaming platform is new territory.

The episodes were filmed live at Fanatics Fest in New York in August, a departure from the show’s controlled studio format. Live filming at a sports-and-entertainment convention introduces ambient variables, specifically the crowd energy and the performers’ awareness of a physical room, that a controlled studio does not. Whether that makes the conversations more spontaneous or simply more performative is among the things the next week of critical reaction will sort out.

Hart’s relationship with Netflix has become the defining commercial arc of his career’s current chapter. The Roast of Kevin Hart in May drew 13.5 million first-week viewers, placing it among the platform’s strongest comedy events of the year. His film 72 Hours, a scripted Miami comedy that premiered in July, tested a different register from the unscripted personality-driven format Cold as Balls runs on, with mixed results. Cold as Balls lands today as the project most aligned with what Hart has always done best: unscripted, direct, and built entirely on the premise that physical discomfort and genuine curiosity produce better conversation than press-junket proximity.

Netflix’s experiments this year with linear and live programming formats signal an interest in appointment-viewing products that operate differently from its traditional drop-and-binge model. Cold as Balls, filmed live at a convention in August and released as a seven-episode batch today, sits at the intersection of both tendencies: the live-event energy of the filming, and the simultaneity of a full season release designed for algorithmic performance in the first 24 hours.

IShowSpeed, born Darren Watkins Jr., is the presence most likely to generate conversation beyond the show’s existing audience. His celebrity runs on a model Cold as Balls was not designed for: spontaneous, internet-native, built on moments that travel virally before traditional entertainment infrastructure can contextualize them. Placing him in the cold tub opposite Hart is either a format risk or a format gift, depending entirely on what he actually says.

Cooper Flagg’s episode was filmed in August, before his selection in the 2026 NBA Draft. It captures him at a specific hinge: among the most hyped prospects of his generation, talked about constantly, not yet employed by any franchise. Unscripted conversation at that particular moment, before the team identity becomes the context, produces something most sports documentaries cannot get after the fact.

What Season 13 does not answer is what the show does from here. The format has not changed in eight years. The guest radius has expanded from retired athletes to active legends to internet personalities, but the ice-tub mechanics are identical to Season 1. Whether that consistency is the show’s reliability or its ceiling is what viewers will start deciding today, when all seven episodes of Cold as Balls Season 13 become available on Netflix.