David Lynch may have taken an extended break from feature filmmaking, but he hasn’t been idle. In addition to marketing his own brand of coffee and trying to save the world through transcendental meditation, the director of Blue Velvet has also lent his name to Interview Project, a 121-part documentary series airing on his website. The premise is fairly simple: Lynch dispatched a small film crew on a cross-country odyssey to capture video portraits of everyday Americans. The results, however, are complicated.

Most of the segments, which premiere every three days, are artfully rendered, with sufficient attention paid to local color, detail and atmosphere. What rankles after a while is the relative sameness of the interview subjects’ station. There are mostly poor, wounded people here. Jess from Needles, CA, hasn’t spoken to his children in 25 years. Tommie Holliday from Kingman, AZ, is living in a van until his girlfriend finishes a jail term for murdering a previous beau with a machine gun. And Kee from Tuba City, AZ, has stopped cross-dressing and moved back to the reservation since he found God. Broken dreams and missing teeth are the two most consistent elements that unite these individuals, making the project feel at times like a sustained exercise in poverty porn.

It’s hard to believe that Lynch’s idea of “everyday” Americans excludes so many, but then one wonders how deeply involved he is. Although he introduces each segment, he doesn’t appear to have been very hands-on. Perhaps he now considers himself something of Warholian impresario who needn’t get his hands dirty anymore. Or maybe he’s just preoccupied hustling his dry roast blend.