Pete Holmes stood in front of his small stage. At 6'6", the comedian towered over the first row of audience members, whom he addressed a few feet in front of the tape that signaled where exactly he would deliver his monologue in just a few minutes.

"Sometimes, people are nervous," Holmes told the crowd in the small studio on the Warner Bros. lot in Los Angeles, where he is taping his new TBS late-night program, The Pete Holmes Show. "We're a new show. People are tense, nervous for me, nervous they're gonna be made fun of or something, and nothing like that is gonna happen, so let's all just enjoy it. You're in a safe place."

Soon, the 34-year-old Boston native's soft and kind voice turned a bit more (jokingly) severe, as he expressed his concern that the show could be "pre-canceled ... Maybe they'll watch this episode today and say it's not working; lesbian Val Kilmer is not clicking with the people."

"You better laugh at everything I say," Holmes continued. "In two minutes, I'm going to be on this mark and there will be cameras rolling and I'm going to be doing a monologue I've never done before, and if you leave me, and I'm up here and you just decide to judge me on my merit, I'll burn down your childhood home," he implored, his faux anger overridden by his inability to fully hold in a booming laughter.

The small studio audience, mostly high schoolers and twentysomethings, more than complied with the request, applauding at each wild assertion Holmes made in his several-minute monologue riff about farmers and daylight saving time.

After several segments, including a rant about hotel towels and a goofy interview with The Mindy Project's Ike Barinholtz, Holmes debriefed his small team of writers and producers. Then, he met up with BuzzFeed in a small dressing room behind his set, which looks like a version of Don Draper's second apartment that's been filled with cartoon artwork.

It was the end of his first week of filming the show that Holmes has been anticipating since he shot three pilots in August 2012, and instead of being exhausted, the host was buzzing with energy.