Mike Schur’s The Good Place was a cosmic epic about what happens when the universe is fundamentally broken. But it was also a four-season discussion of the best way to live a good life — for both yourself and the world around you. It just brilliantly inserted these questions of philosophy and ethics into a candy-coated shell of jokes about telemarketing scams and Florida Men.
Schur’s new series, the Netflix comedy A Man on the Inside, reunites him with Good Place co-star Ted Danson, and approaches many of the same ideas in a very different, but still hugely appealing way.
The setting this time isn’t the afterlife, but it’s close: a San Francisco retirement community whose occupants are keenly aware that they don’t have many more trips around the sun to enjoy. Danson plays Charles, a retired college professor who still hasn’t gotten over the death of his wife, and has retreated into a hermit’s existence where he rarely interacts with other people, outside of clipping and mailing random newspaper articles to his daughter Emily (Mary Elizabeth Ellis). When Emily urges him to get back into the world in some way, he comes across an ad from Julie (Lilah Richcreek Estrada), a private investigator looking into a jewel robbery at the Pacific View Retirement Residence, who’s been hired by the victim’s wealthy son (Schur regular Marc Evan Jackson). With no obvious means of access to the facility on her own, Julie decides to send a senior citizen in there to pose as a new resident and get to the bottom of this. The job gives Charles a temporary purpose, as well as an excuse to clumsily act out various vintage spy movie fantasies.
The mystery is deliberately low-stakes(*), and largely besides the point. The show follows Charles and Julie’s investigation throughout its eight-episode season, and solves it, and there are some farcical developments along the way as Pacific View’s director Didi (Stephanie Beatriz) grows suspicious of her new charge. Mostly, though, the case is an excuse to get Charles into Pacific View, to force him to make new friends, and for him and others to consider how to make the most of the time remaining to them.
(*) The series is adapted from the Oscar-nominated 2021 Spanish documentary The Mole Agent, where the mystery was potentially far more grave: Was a resident of a nursing home being abused by the staff?
The other residents demonstrate a wide range of possible approaches to this phase of aging. Calbert (Stephen McKinley Henderson), like Charles, mostly keeps to himself, frustrated that he finds himself in this place after a full life built elsewhere. Virginia (Sally Struthers) and Florence (Margaret Avery) have taken it upon themselves to be Pacific View’s unofficial social chairs, reaching out to Charles and everyone else, and trying to have fun. Elliot (John Getz) is going through a kind of second adolescence, enjoying the lack of responsibilities he now has. Susan (Lori Tan Chinn) has taken the opposite route, ruling the residents association with an iron fist. Gladys (Susan Ruttan) and Grant (Clyde Kusatsu) both seem stuck in the past, but for different reasons: Gladys is experiencing the early stages of dementia, while Grant is just a pompous twit who enjoys repeating stories about himself.
The cast is wonderful from top to bottom. From Danson, this isn’t a surprise. He remains one of the most graceful, versatile, and game comic performers television has ever been lucky enough to have. A nurse at Pacific View describes Charles as “like if a podcast wore a suit,” and much of the fun of the series is seeing how the case pushes him out of his comfort zone — and how much he comes to enjoy living an unpredictable life again.
Veronica Cartwright (left) and Stephanie Beatriz
Colleen E. Hayes/Netflix
The supporting cast is great, too, but often in unexpected ways. Henderson and Getz are character actors who specialize in dramatic roles, but Henderson is dryly funny as the resident skeptic, and Getz leans way into Elliot’s comic abrasiveness. Stephanie Beatriz is practically unrecognizable from Rosa Diaz, the hard-edged cop she played for Schur on Brooklyn Nine-Nine, speaking in her normal register and giving off a much gentler, more empathetic vibe. Other actors like Struthers, Avery, and Ruttan(*) are more in the range of characters they’ve played before (it’s not hard to draw a line between Virginia here and Struthers as the nosy Babette on Gilmore Girls). But even though all of them have been working frequently since their more famous roles, this feels like a bigger, better showcase than they’ve had in a while.
(*) Ruttan and Danson playing scenes together is something of a reunion of NBC’s famous Thursday night lineup in the Eighties, when she was on L.A. Law and he was on Cheers.
A benefit of making a show predominantly about people in their seventies in a youth-obsessed business is that you have access to a vast pool of talent that’s no longer being fully utilized. (Veronica Cartwright, who’s been working in TV and film since the late 1950s, has a smaller role as another Pacific View resident.) Charles discovering how much the world still has to offer him even at his advanced age feels almost as much a commentary on that as it does on life itself.
A Man on the Inside isn’t as laugh-out-loud funny as the other series Schur has created or co-created (see also Parks and Recreation). But it’s smart and it’s kind and it’s incredibly warm, a necessary balm at a moment when the world feels very angry and cold. It’s unclear what the future will bring for any of us, but getting out of your comfort zone and getting to know other people is enormously valuable at any age.
All eight episodes of A Man on the Inside are now streaming on Netflix. I’ve seen the full season.
