Gimlet is trying something a little different with its first scripted podcast series, Homecoming, which stars Catherine Keener, Oscar Isaac, and David Schwimmer. In addition to the caliber of acting on display, the project comes from experimental storyteller Eli Horowitz, and it feels defiantly modern in its production and writing.

The series premiere, released Wednesday, introduces a nonlinear narrative structure. It opens on the first meeting between Walter Cruz (Isaac), a soldier who’s just returned home and is struggling with trauma, and Heidi Bergman (Keener), his caseworker for the Homecoming Initiative, a reintegration project still awaiting full congressional approval. Their conversation is deliberately ambiguous, with periodic flash-forwards—wherein Heidi, five years later, is hiding out and made anxious by the mere mention of Homecoming—indicating that things will soon go very wrong. (For fans of the HBO series Show Me a Hero, the series also serves as a mini-reunion for Isaac and his former co-star.) Meanwhile, Schwimmer plays Keener’s boss.

Based on this small sampling, Homecoming sounds like a slow-burning psychological thriller, very much in the vein of the series that have made up the recent wave of prestige crime dramas, whereas previous scripted podcasts, such as Limetown, Welcome to Night Vale, and Panoply’s own The Message, have tended to hew closer to science fiction. (Both Panoply and Slate are part of the Slate Group.) And beyond that, the show takes advantage of its medium, using aural flourishes—arguments in the background of an airport, fish swimming in an aquarium—to provide an eerily realistic sense of time and place. It’s too early to say whether Horowitz’s threads—explorations of sweeping governmental conspiracies and post-traumatic stress disorder among them—will come together in a satisfying way. But for now, there’s at least one compelling reason for checking out Homecoming:

You can listen to Homecoming above or by subscribing on iTunes.