Larry Wilmore's inaugural show is coming into focus.
The host of Comedy Central's The Nightly Show will kick off Jan. 19 with Sen. Cory Booker, rapper Talib Kweli and comedian Bill Burr contributing to his first panel. Later in the month, panelists on the show, which will focus on underrepresented points of view, will include Amy Holmes, John Leguizamo, Jon Lovett, Kathleen Madigan, Soledad O'Brien, David Remnick, Frank Rich, Ilyasah Shabazz, Matt Taibbi, Baratunde Thurston and Ali Wentworth.
The announcements come just days after Wilmore, best known to Comedy Central viewers as the "senior black correspondent" on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, previewed the show for members of the Television Critics Association in Pasadena, Calif. If Daily Show was a cousin to nightly news and The Colbert Report is one to opinion news, Wilmore's show will be a cousin to discussion news.
Read More Larry Wilmore Pitches 'Nightly Show': A Mix of 'Daily Show' and 'Politically Incorrect'
Wilmore noted then that he had no plans to use his 11:30 p.m. platform -- a cross-section of The Daily Show and Politically Incorrect -- to rely on the traditional late-night formula of celebrities coming on to hawk their latest film or TV project. Instead, his show will focus the second half of his show on a spirited, topical panel discussion, featuring a mix of famous and non-famous voices.
"Rather than have your normal kind of pundits like you'll see on shows where it's on the left and the right and you already know what they're going to say and you already know what their conclusions are, we'll have people on whose minds may get changed," Wilmore told a room full of critics.
