A Man on the Inside (Netflix), a new US comedy starring Ted Danson, is based on the documentary The Mole Agent, an Oscar-nominated Chilean film by Maite Alberdi, from 2020. In the film, a private investigator hires an elderly man to go undercover in a nursing home.
Straight away you can see the potential for comedy, but also for a dud. Old people’s foibles – “Where are my glasses?” “They’re on your head!” etc – are rarely that funny to anyone other than old people. Moreover, old people sparking up for new adventures can easily feel patronising, given that those adventures are generally written by younger people in baseball caps.
A Man on the Inside, however, is so well put together that it banishes any such quibbles. I went in to it with the sick bag at hand just in case, and came out grinning from ear to ear.
The eight-part run of half hours begins in flashback, with a youthified Ted Danson making his wedding speech on glitchy VHS. In it, he asks his new wife to grow old with him, before jumping forward 30 years to the present with Danson’s retired college professor now lying listless… in an empty double bed.
That sets the tone and also seeds the concern – mawkishness and nostalgia are rarely breeding grounds for hilarity. Luckily, A Man on the Inside is the creation of Michael Schur, whose credentials run from The Good Place back through Brooklyn Nine-Nine, Parks and Recreation and the US Office. Schur is one of the writers who has made American comedy great again, and if you know any of those titles listed above, he’s done it by shifting the dial from cynicism and cringe to a winning amalgam of sharp lines and heart.