If you kept your channel tuned to MTV after the VMAs (which ran long, big shocker), you saw the premiere of the sneak peek of World of Jenks, which celebrates its official premiere on Monday night. Andrew Jenks is a buzzworthy young filmmaker who is best-known for his Room 335 project, in which he moved into an assisted living facility.

The premise behind World of Jenks is simple: the filmmaker will move in with interesting individuals for one week and learn about their lives. He is no mere fly on the wall, however. Jenks asks questions, gets answers and explores each person’s background.

In the sneak peek episode, Jenks moved in with rapper Maino, who did hard time for kidnapping. Maino had only two conditions for the filmmaker: “No cryin’, no bitchin’.” Maino meant what he said. He is a hard-core partier. As he explained to Jenks, “I want to wake up almost dead.” And that takes a lot of partying.

It was all true: there were women. There were wild parties. But Maino is more than a clubber and a performer; he’s also a father. He took Jenks to his son’s elementary school, where he signed autographs before taking his son home in a white SUV. At one point Maino and Jenks had words, and Maino choked him out before smacking him in the face.

In one heart-to-heart, Maino explained how the time in jail gave him time to think. “In the streets…you don’t have that time,” he said. There was no time for ideas, or for dreams, before Maino was incarcerated. He decided while in jail that he would give the music industry a try, and that’s what he did. Maino summed it all up rather poetically: “Sometimes, you gotta go through Hell to get Heaven.”

Maino even took Jenks to his old hood in Brooklyn. To culminate the visit, the rapper took the filmmaker to Atlanta where he opened for T.I.

The half-hour series doesn’t leave a lot of room for deep exploration or for storytelling, but it does provide a small window into worlds most of us can’t even imagine. Is it the next ground-breaking series in documentary television? No, absolutely not. Is it good enough to give the official premiere a try? …It just might be.