TCA: on her Move to for and Doc Series

07.28.2015

There were countless questions about Chelsea Handler's upcoming Netflix talk show at Tuesday's Netflix TCA panel, but with very few details to reveal, Handler chose to focus on her series of documentaries for the streaming platform, entitled .

The four documentaries will be Chelsea Does Marriage, Chelsea Does Racism, Chelsea Does and, most intriguingly, Chelsea Does Drugs.

Handler says the series is "very different than anything I've done before. Some were very personal, some eye-opening, some very jarring."

The Silicon Valley doc will be tied into her Netflix partnership, she says, with interviews with people at Netflix incorporated into the feature.

"It's rooted in the fact that it's Netflix," says Handler. "I don't know what streaming is, I don't know how it works. Technology makes me so irate that I was like, 'I need to talk to these people.'"

And as a crossover opportunity, she and her team also spoke with the cast and crew at Netflix's drug series as well for Chelsea Does Drugs. Each part of the series will be a feature-length documentary, which will pave the way for her talk show, which will debut sometime in 2016.

When asked if she missed the daily grind of a nightly talk show, her abrupt answer: "No. I loved it, it was fun and I was done."

She says she doesn't have details about the format of the talk show because her first focus is finishing the documentary series, but the show will be released a few times per week - not on a nightly basis like .

She was very vocal about being happy to leave E! but she says Netflix is a very different place to work.

"Netflix is very well known for letting you drive your own car," she says of the platform's creative license. "They're very talent-oriented. It's such a pleasure to work with people who have faith in you and let you blossom."

So does Netflix give notes like a network would? She says yes, but they're "respectful and open, not like network executives who often give notes for the sake of giving notes."

That's part of the reason why she wasn't interested in taking over another late-night show. Handler says she was approached by a few networks amidst the changes in the late-night landscape this year, but no conversation went very far.

"I was never interested in taking someone else's job," says Handler. "I wanted something different."

In fact, she says that she came out to California in order to speak her own mind, not act with someone else's words or step into someone else's role.

"I think I just wanted somebody to hear what I had to say," she says of her start in Hollywood. "That quickly turned into standup comedy because that was a way to get a microphone and not be interrupted."