Kevin Hart’s production company Hartbeat is ready to diversify the microdramas industry, expanding the verticals format into comedy.
Hartbeat President and Chief Distribution Officer Jeff Clanagan believes there is an audience beyond the “genre monoculture” that has formed around the leading vertical apps. Microdramas have largely been defined by melodramatic, salacious romantic tropes, but Hartbeat’s LOL Network plans to tap into the format’s rapid growth through comedy, the genre in which the company has traditionally thrived.
“Let’s call it what it is. Vertical is the business, and microdrama is just one genre inside it,” Clanagan said. “Right now that genre is stacked with the same billionaire-CEO, secret-marriage, mafia-romance cliffhangers running on repeat. Comedy is the open lane, and we’ve been operating in it at scale for a decade.”
“The audience, the talent and the distribution are already here,” he added. “We’re not entering vertical. We’re expanding what we’ve already built.”
LOL Network has garnered more than 13 million social followers across platforms with over 500 million vertical views generated in 2025 alone, according to the company. The company noted that, as opposed to new microdrama platforms, they do not have to compete for the same verticals audience.
“The microdrama category has proven that vertical storytelling is a real business,” Clanagan continued. “What it hasn’t proven yet is that the genre monoculture we’re seeing today is what audiences will still be watching five years from now. Every dominant format eventually opens up. Comedy is where vertical opens up first.”
Hartbeat’s first venture into the vertical format will be “Freshman 15.” The series will consist of 15 15-minute stand-up specials spotlighting the next generation of digitally native comedic talent, debuting first on LOL Network in an exclusive first window.
Hartbeat will also partner with talent management and production company Artists First and digital production studio Kids at Play to produce original vertical content for its channels. Artists First represents established comedic talent including Anthony Anderson, Awkwafina and Niecy Nash, as well as two leading microdrama directors, Danny Farber and Kristen Brancaccio.
The three companies previously collaborated on a Quibi series “Die Hart” that later moved to The Roku Channel and the 2024 Paramount/Comedy Central film “Cursed Friends.”
Additional projects from Hartbeat’s verticals comedy slate have yet to be announced, but the company noted that this slate is designed to redefine genre within the vertical format.
“We’re working with a new generation of comedic creators who understand the audience, and with legacy comedic voices whose work deserves to reach that audience in the format it’s already watching,” Luke Kelly-Clyne, head of studio at Hartbeat, said. “The goal is to build programming that surprises, that feels built for this moment, and that continues the work Hartbeat has been doing in comedy for years.”
This is not Hart’s first rodeo in the short-form video space. The comedian was one of the first partners in Jeffrey Katzenberg’s short-form mobile streaming service Quibi, which launched in 2020.
His project “Die Hart” initially premiered on the mobile app before being re-edited into a feature film that released on Prime Video in February 2023. “Die Hart” was Quibi’s most-viewed show of the summer when it came out in 2020, according to a release shared by the company.
The post Kevin Hart’s LOL Network Expands Vertical Comedy Slate to Compete With Romantic Microdramas appeared first on TheWrap.
