"You feel the need to be entertaining, and before you know it, you doing dumb **** 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 ****, 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 **** 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."
