Netflix's A Man on the Inside: Michael Schur and Ted Danson Discuss the Uplifting Geriatric Spy Comedy

A Man on the Inside is unlike any other comedy Michael Schur has done. Sure, it's funny, features a large cast, and stars Ted Danson, whom Schur worked with on The Good Place. But according to the showrunner, this series is gentler and a little more meditative than past projects.

"That's partly why I wanted to do it," he tells TVGuide.com. "Doing the same thing over and over again, even if it's fun and successful, isn't that interesting. I wanted to try something different and still have it be funny, but to have different themes, different ideas, different kinds of characters. It felt different from things I'd done before and that was a big part of the selling point to me."

It was Schur's producing partner Morgan Sackett who first came up with the idea of remaking the Oscar-nominated documentary The Mole Agent as a comedy with Ted Danson in the leading role. The 2020 film featured an elderly man responding to a classified ad and going undercover in an assisted living community where thefts had taken place. 

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In developing the comedy, both producers knew Danson was the only one who could bring an earnest vibe to the role of a man finding new purpose in life while moonlighting as a private investigator. 

"Mike knows me and everything I got to do was in my wheelhouse," Danson says. "I love being silly and I love being genuine and real and going deep. I got to do all of that in the service of a great story that matters to me, because I'm of an age."

In the series, Danson's character Charles is grappling with his wife's death and the distance between himself and his daughter, Emily (Mary Elizabeth Ellis). When he answers an ad to go undercover in an assisted living community and report on its happenings, private investigator Julie (Lilah Richcreek Estrada) hires him on the spot. Charles then enters the facility, managed by a woman named Didi (Stephanie Beatriz), under false pretenses. From there an extended cast of characters, including ones played by Sally Struthers and Stephen McKinley Henderson appear. 

"Charles is a guy whose wife was the one who made them go out and do things and push the boundaries of what their life experience could be," says Schur. "He goes through an entire day and doesn't say a single world out loud. I believe that is natural and also something we should try to resist with every fiber of our being. As we get older we should remember that human beings need other human beings to survive."

In tackling those kinds of themes the series has a more serious undertone than some of Schur's other projects, like Parks and Recreation or Brooklyn Nine-Nine. The team wanted to elicit the same emotional response they got from watching the documentary, and everything they wrote was in service to that. The conversations surrounding dementia, for example, were necessary, but don't weigh down the tone thanks to the lighter environment and surrounding characters. 

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"Dementia is a stark reality for an enormous amount of people who are this age, so we weren't going to avoid it," says Schur. "We weren't going to downplay it or ridicule it. We wanted to confront it head-on and take it seriously, and trust that the show is warm and inviting enough at other parts so that people will want to come back. It was the only way to do it."

At the end of eight episodes (and with the potential for more), the creative team behind the series hopes it leaves viewers with the same sense they had in watching the doc and making the series: the desire to call the people you love and to lead a life of purpose. 

"There is no shelf life to your creativity, to your contribution to the world, to joy," says Danson. "You can go until you no longer are capable of going at all, until you die. You can always contribute something if you think of your life as one of purpose. I hope that's what I do in my life and it's definitely one of the messages of this story."

All eight episodes of A Man on the Inside stream on Netflix Nov. 21.