Chelsea Handler lets loose on new talk show

‘Overachiever” barely begins to describe Chelsea Handler, the blunt and fearless comic who has always boogied to the beat of her own drum regardless of societal norms and conventional ­expectations.

She’s also the kind of girl who has scads of questions on a wide range of subjects – and has ­begun her quest to travel the globe to get the answers she craves.

"I like to be really challenged. I like to be nervous when I do stuff. I don't like to get too ­comfortable," she says on the eve of her new talk show, Chelsea, which begins streaming on Netflix tomorrow.

"It's a mix of all kinds of things," says the 41-year-old. "I'm basically treating it as the college education that I forgot to get, which Netflix is funding. It's what you would want college to be once you turn 40 and you realise what you're actually interested in ... [I'm] getting answers to questions, but also keeping my sense of humour about everything – so you can get information in a fun, cool way. Like, imagine if 60 ­Minutes were funny."

To her credit, Handler has been nothing but trouble – hurling barbs of the most entertaining and enjoyable variety – since we first noticed her as a practical ­joker on the hidden-camera show Girls Behaving Badly (2002-2005).

Later, as the host of E!'s Chelsea Lately, her alternative talk show that wrapped up its successful seven-year run in August 2014, Handler proved that a female could break into the otherwise male-dominated late-night ­arena.

World is her comic oyster

With Chelsea, she'll travel far and wide to offer up unfiltered opinions on topical entertainment and cultural issues.

She’ll tap everyday folks and celebrity guests to help her explore alternative lifestyles and international cultures, education, health, sports, parenting and politics.

Basically, whatever spins Handler’s crank is grist for each half-hour show – with three new shows weekly – and that’s exactly how she likes it.

While Handler has gained a cheeky bit of notoriety for her penchant of posting nearly nude selfies on the internet – either as a way to wish her friends a happy birthday or to protest politicians she despises, such as Donald Trump – overall her résumé is to die for.

She's been honoured as one of Glamour magazine's Women of the Year and was also featured in TIME magazine's annual TIME 100.

Her multiplatform success as a best-selling author, talk show host, and stand-up comedian proves the actress is no fluke.

As a non-fiction author, she has five best-sellers currently in print; her recently released fifth book, the travelogue Uganda Be Kidding Me, was her fourth book to debut at No 1 on the New York Times best-seller list.

On top of her new show, which is being produced in Los ­Angeles with executive producer Bill Wolff (The View), her landmark Netflix deal also includes a stand-up ­special and a four-part documentary series, Chelsea Does – on ­marriage, racism, ­Silicon Valley and drugs – which is now available on Netflix.

Money no object

Money has never been much of a motivator for Handler, who says she turned down pots of gold ­before deciding to do her own thing on Netflix.

After Chelsea Lately ended, "I looked at my life. I thought: I'm bored. I'm not being as smart as I am. I want to do a show that's smarter than me. I want to make my mother proud, my family proud. I want to take chances. I want to set an example."

“I could have gotten paid US$10 million [Dh36.7m] a year for the next five years, [but] that is never a reason to make a decision,” she adds.

“I had planned on just ­quitting, indefinitely, and not doing anything. But as soon as everybody heard I was quitting, I got all these offers and people were throwing ridiculous amounts of money at me.

“And I just kept hearing the voice in my head saying: ‘Don’t do something for money. Don’t ever fill somebody else’s shoes. Don’t go into that network environment where you’re told what to do by a man who thinks he’s doing you a favour by giving you a job.’

“At the end of the day, I said to my manager, ‘I want to meet ­Netflix.’ I met with an amazing team of really intelligent people. I said, ‘I want to do this’. And they said, ‘let’s do it’.”

In a memo to herself, she also offered up another nugget of advice: “You’ll be streaming in 196 countries, so remember to keep a deeper, more culturally sensitive perspective. Especially towards the Germans; they’re still touchy about everything they did.”

• Chelsea streams on Netflix starting on Wednesday, May 9, 2016. New episodes will stream every Wednesday, Thursday and Friday

artslife@thenational.ae