Standing on the set of his new Netflix series, “Patriot Act,” one evening earlier this month, Hasan Minhaj asked his studio audience if they had any questions about what they were about to see. He knew that his stage, an immense digital screen encircling the diamond-shape platform he was standing on, was a bit of a technological monstrosity — “it’s like if Michael Bay directed a PowerPoint presentation,” he joked to the crowd — and so some clarification might be required.

Sure enough, someone asked: “What is this?”

Minhaj, 33, a lean, energetic stand-up and a recent alumnus of “The Daily Show,” explained that “Patriot Act” (whose first two episodes will be released on Oct. 28) was a project he had been developing for more than two years.

Before the success of his stand-up special “Homecoming King” and his incisive turn as host of the 2017 White House Correspondents Dinner, he said he’d already been thinking about applying his comedic style to news stories that weren’t necessarily at the center of everyone’s attention, in a format that didn’t look like another cookie-cutter late-night comedy.

The test show that Minhaj was about to perform — a 24-minute monologue about the role of Asian-Americans in reshaping affirmative action, and a 10-minute piece about digital security in Estonia — could very well end up looking like a “woke TED Talk,” he said.