Wyatt Cenac wants to talk to you. Genuinely. In conversation, he's not constantly searching for a wry response or a joke. He'll describe an entire Planet Money episode to make a point. (It's the one about ReadyReturn called "Tax Hero," if you're wondering.) His willingness to engage—truly and deeply—is one of the reasons why his new HBO series Wyatt Cenac's Problem Areas diverges from a familiar late-night template ushered in by his fellow Daily Show alums. Cenac doesn't go on rants so much as he poses questions. But he's less college lecturer and more cool T.A. It's the Socratic method of late night.

"He really really likes to talk to people. That's sort of the joke," Problem Areas head writer Hallie Haglund says. "It's very difficult to keep him on schedule for stuff because, once he starts talking to people, he's really interested in what people want to say."

During the opening episode, which premiered April 13, Cenac lays down important ground rules for what he's trying to accomplish: First off, over the course of Problem Areas' initial season, you're not going to find a live audience laughing along with Cenac. Instead, he'll speak to his viewers from the comfort of Maggie Ruder's homey, wood-paneled set, inspired by the public affairs shows of the ‘60s like Gil Noble's Like It Is that arose as a result of the Kerner Commission. It's in this environment—which feels more like a library than a CNN studio—that Cenac announces he's not going to be discussing all the ways in which Trump is bad. He assumes you know that already. Rather, he'll share thoughts on topics, like space and sustainability, before delving into a field segment that looks at a different aspect of policing. Yes, in one way or another, all ten half-hour installments will deal with America's police force, trying to cut through and give deeper context for the endless recurring headlines about police violence against black citizens.

"We have sort of made a 200-minute documentary that we have sandwiched into a comedy show," Cenac tells GQ in a small HBO meeting room, shortly after debuting a test show for press. (That test show looked an awful lot like what aired April 13; however, the team re-shot Cenac's in-studio segments.) The show is roughly divided into three blocks: In the first two—one of which is deemed "A Modest Proposal" and adorned with whimsical animation—Cenac and his team can approach problems that maybe seem a little less daunting than, say, fixing the country's police departments and their culture. For instance, he's been tossing around an idea about solar power. He wants to show his audience "blueprints" for how to accomplish something, even if he's not expecting to galvanize people into making immediate change.

While it's easy to compare Problem Areas' approach to John Oliver's Last Week Tonight or Samantha Bee's Full Frontal, Cenac himself finds a more apt parallel in the nation's most reliable cooking competition: Top Chef. "Like Top Chef, they show you, and it's like, Ooh, it's maybe not that hard to make a dashi broth. I've still never done it, but I feel like, oh yeah, I think I have the ingredients to do that. Padma is not telling me, go make a dashi broth," he explains. "But I think in that way to me what I find interesting about doing something like this is not just throwing my hands up in the air and [saying] 'It fucking sucks, why does it suck, let's all just commiserate on how it sucks, and I'll tell you how it sucks in a funny way, but let's all just commiserate in the suck.' It felt like, okay, is there something to also pivoting and showing is there more out there, and that's not necessarily on me to say go do it."