If Michael Schur has a trademark, it’s bone-deep niceness. A decade and a half ago, he transformed Parks and Recreation from a lacklustre Office clone into a classic, simply by making the characters more optimistic. Next came The Good Place, a show about reaching heaven through self-improvement. After that he wrote a book called How to be Perfect. The man knows his stuff.
So when it was announced that Schur’s newest project would be a Netflix series called A Man on the Inside, niceness was always going to be a key factor. However, the level he reaches here is unprecedented, even by his standards. This show is Schur planting a flag as the Sir Edmund Hillary of nice.
A Man on the Inside is the story of Charles (Ted Danson), a lonely, retired widower who takes a job with a private investigator, infiltrating a retirement home to discover the identity of a thief. Only, as you may have guessed, the job gives him purpose and the residents give him companionship and everything is lovely and sweet and heartwarming. The series is based on the Oscar-nominated documentary The Mole Agent because all this happened in real life.
The problem is that The Mole Agent is already wonderful. Which begs the same question raised by Taika Waititi’s film Next Goal Wins, similarly based on a superlative documentary feature. What’s the point of making it at all?
Let’s approach this like a detective. Key to getting A Man on the Inside greenlit, you suspect, is that it allows Schur and Danson to work together again. After all, The Good Place reinvigorated Danson’s career, allowing him to play suave and dapper, both of which he does again here. Perhaps other actors would have been tempted to lean more into the character’s advancing years, playing Charles as doddery and incapable. Danson, meanwhile, still has the energy of a man half his age. His timing and spark are as pinpoint as ever and he practically bounds through the episodes. It’s as good a vehicle as he has ever had.
Another point might be that, in setting a series in a retirement home, Schur gets to fill out his cast with some of the greatest character actors of the last 50 years. There’s Stephen McKinley Henderson, who has been in everything from Lincoln to Ladybird. There’s John Getz, from The Fly and Born on the Fourth of July and a million other things. There’s Lori Tan Chinn, from Orange is the New Black and Awkwafina is Nora from Queens. And Clyde Kusatsu, whom you will undoubtedly recognise from any of his 317 acting credits. Sally Struthers is in this. Susan Ruttan is in this. These performers have all been sorely underserved by the entertainment industry. The fact that they are now getting their time in the sun – and on a show about older people with a lot left to offer – is a solid plus.
The knottier question is whether or not A Man on the Inside succeeds. If you come to it as a fan of Schur’s previous work, maybe it doesn’t. This is not a show of belly laughs. Instead, it’s lightly humorous in the way that Bill Lawrence’s Apple TV+ shows are. It’s charming and sweet, and full of characters who appear to be multimillionaires with impeccable taste in home furnishings. It’s funny, but you won’t annoy your neighbours laughing at it.
Stripped of these expectations, though, there is a tenderness here that will sneak up and quietly obliterate you if you’re not careful. The heavy thread that runs through the series is dementia. When it chooses to play that card fully, which happens more and more as the series wears on, A Man on the Inside becomes an all-out weepy. If nothing else, it certainly got to me.
Who knows where A Man on the Inside will go from here. There is certainly the expectation of a renewal – the final scene makes that clear – but there doesn’t seem to be much of a way forward. By the end, the mystery has been solved, Charles has regained his connection to the world and (most importantly) the source material has been exhausted. However, Schur is the master of the second season reinvention, having turned both The Good Place and Parks and Recreation on their heads after their first outings. A Man on the Inside has so much promise that we should hope he is able to repeat the trick again.