David Letterman’s idol Johnny Carson embraced retirement, choosing to stay in his Los Angeles home after hosting his final episode of The Tonight Show in May of 1992. Retirement hasn’t come as easy to Letterman. Not two years after he stepped away from Late Show With David Letterman–the late night program he hosted at CBS after he jumped ship from NBC in 1993 following the network’s decision to give The Tonight Show to his one-time friend turned arch-nemesis Jay Leno–the talk show hosted is back with a new program for Netflix called My Guest Needs No Introduction.

Truth be told, Letterman wasn’t exactly quiet in the two years separating Late Show and My Guest. He appeared on the environmental documentary series Years Of Living Dangerously in 2016, gave a moving induction speech for Pearl Jam at the 2017 Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame ceremony and shot the breeze on Norm MacDonald’s podcast that same year (which you can watch on Amazon Prime, if you’re so inclined). What tied these three appearances together besides Dave’s bushy beard was Letterman’s inclination to let his guard down. Years Of Living Dangerously made his politics plain, his love for Pearl Jam directly connected to his recovery from heart surgery in 2000 and there was an ease to his interplay with Norm that wasn’t always seen on the structured Late Show.

Letterman isn’t entirely without affect on My Guest Needs No Introduction but that is to be expected: he’s not a standup comedian, he’s a broadcaster, keenly attuned to the rhythms that make a television show a different beast than standup. He shakes off some of these hoary traditions on My Guest–there’s no desk or supporting band–but he retains a monologue, as it eases a viewer into the program, and a studio audience because he feeds off the dynamic of performing live.

The odd–and welcome–contradiction of My Guest Needs No Introduction is even though it is filmed in front of a live studio audience, it is broadcast months after its taping. Some of this is due to the vagaries of airing a talk show on Netflix, but it can also be chalked up to the fact Dave is indeed retired and making this show at his leisure.

Which raises the question, why is he doing My Guest Needs No Introduction at all? An answer can be gleaned by the show’s first guest, President Barack Obama. In the age of Donald J. Trump, such a booking is a deliberately political move, but neither the president nor the host indulge in the kind of firebombs that have come to define our cultural discourse. Instead, the pair have a warm, genial conversation whose chief appeal is that it’s a warm, genial conversation between two intelligent, witty and human adults. If their talk meanders without direction, that’s the point: the pleasure is the journey itself.

Letterman sharpens his political intent on My Guest Needs No Introduction‘s pre-taped packages featuring the host visiting Georgia congressman John Lewis, walking over the Edmund Pettus Bridge–the very place where Lewis was beaten by police during a civil rights protest in Selma, Alabama. Letterman was alive at the time but he wasn’t political, he was concerned with buying booze, a fact that he recounts to Obama as he seemingly fights back tears. Now that he’s 70, living in an America where a portion of the populace seem hellbent to forget the progress achieved in the ’60s, he’s wondering if he could’ve done more when he was a young man.

Wise enough to realize he can’t change the past, Letterman is attempting to change the present with My Guest Needs No Introduction. His greatest tool in combating the rise of ignorance is using the form he mastered, so he’s made a talk show that defies all modern conventions. At its core, it feels like a throwback to the unhurried cadences of The Late Late Show With Tom Snyder–the program that followed Dave’s Late Show in the ’90s–but this format has been adapted so it doesn’t feel stuffy: it’s loose, occasionally profane, and its host is keenly aware that his program is unlike anything else on the air. And that’s Letterman’s quiet triumph with My Guest Needs No Introduction: by slowing down the show’s pace and releasing it on a monthly basis, he’s forcing viewers to step out of the clamor of constant information and, in doing so, he’s offering a reminder that chasing the current story often obscures the larger truths.

Stephen Thomas Erlewine is a Senior Editor of Pop Music at Tivo.com, where he’s written thousands of artist biographies and record reviews. Tivo’s music database is licensed throughout the net—Spotify, Apple Music and iTunes, I Heart Media, Pandora and Tidal are all customers—and is easily seen at www.allmusic.com. Additionally, he’s freelanced for Pitchfork, Billboard, Rolling Stone, Spin and New York Magazine’s Vulture.

Watch My Next Guest Needs No Introduction with David Letterman on Netflix