Over the past two decades, Michael Schur has been responsible for some of your favorite TV shows. He was a producer and writer on The Office before co-creating Parks and Recreation, Brooklyn Nine-Nine and The Good Place. His comedy is always heartfelt rather than targeted, and his characters often come from a place of good intentions, even if they occasionally falter. His latest show, Netflix’s A Man on the Inside, embraces similar themes, but with an even more poignant sensibility. The series, based on Maite Alberdi’s 2020 Oscar-nominated documentary The Mole Agent, reflects on the loneliness people feel as they grow older and how we’re never quite as isolated as we think.
Like the documentary, A Man on the Inside follows a seventy-something man, Charles (Ted Danson), who is hired to infiltrate an assisted living facility, Pacific View, to identify a thief. While posing as a new inhabitant, Charles finds himself connecting with many of his fellow retirees, including Calbert (Stephen Mckinley Henderson) and Florence (Margaret Avery), as well as the facility’s manager Didi (Stephanie Beatriz). Becoming a private eye also helps Charles reconnect with his daughter Emily (Mary Elizabeth Ellis) and her family. Schur knew the story would work best if it was both funny and touching.
“The documentary was a pretty good instruction manual for the series,” Schur tells Observer. “The premise is very funny to me and very silly, but the feeling you have at the end of [the documentary] is not, ‘That was amazingly hilarious,.’ It’s got comedy in it, but what you feel at the end is, ‘I’ve got to call my dad’ or ‘I need to call my grandma.’ That’s a pretty neat trick to pull to have such a broad premise and then to make people feel a certain way. We knew we had to add a lot of stuff to the documentary to turn it into a series, but we always used that as the guiding principle. We really wanted people to feel at the end of the series the way that you feel when you watch the documentary.”
Although it’s not officially greenlit for season two, A Man on the Inside will potentially continue, with Danson’s character taking on more cases. For now, the first season will surprise and delight audiences while also sending them running to call their older relatives. Here Schur talks about adapting the documentary, casting Danson and why making TV only keeps getting more difficult.
Why did this documentary make sense to be adapted into a comedy series?
The documentary is focused on Sergio, who is unique and lovable and charismatic in his own pixie-ish way. There aren’t that many people who have that natural charisma. Because I had worked with Ted before it was like, “Oh, I actually know one of the only people on Earth who could pull this off.” A 70-something-year-old guy who is funny and can be very silly, but also has that depth, that nuance, that peeling an onion away quality.
It was my producing partner, Morgan Sackett, who had the idea and he sent me an email that was like, “We should just remake that and make Ted play the main character.” Which is an obvious, no-brainer idea. It’s an unlikely story in its true form in the documentary, but it works because of how much you care about Sergio. And Ted is the kind of guy who can make people care about a main character. If I didn’t know Ted, I don’t think I would have felt like it was a good idea to attempt this. But since I did, hey, what the hell? Why not?
How long did you spend figuring out what this world would look like and who the characters in it would be?
A long time! The actual premise is very funny, but to make it a series there had to be more going on. In the documentary, there’s a scene at the beginning where Sergio is weighing whether to take the job and he’s sitting with his daughter and she’s expressing a fair amount of concern. As I think any daughter might about her father suddenly becoming a private investigator and going undercover. They have this really sweet conversation where he says, “Since your mom died, I haven’t known what to do with myself. I just kind of wander around my house and I don’t have any passion or anything driving me.” To me, that was the key of how to expand. The daughter had to be a character. We have to understand her life.
And part of that was selfish because the daughter’s position is the position I’m in in my real life, where my parents are in their 70s and I have my own kids and my own career. It’s a very odd thing to suddenly have your parents need you in a different way than they needed you before. Once I figured out that needed to be a part of it, everything else started to fall into place.
Emily’s teenage sons are probably one of the funniest parts of the show.
Thank you for saying this. This has been a point of contention because I find them so funny. I know this is just my personal bias, but my son is 16 and my daughter is 14. The sons are not in it very much, but I really love them in the show because I think there’s an incredible amount of reality to the way they just exist. People who don’t have kids that age are like, “Why are these kids in the show?” And I’m like, “No, trust me, anyone who has a 16-year-old-boy is going to understand this.” So I’ll see if I’m right. But that was the bet I made.
Did you take inspiration from any spy movies or books?
I love spy movies. Every episode of the show is named after a famous spy novel or movie. “Tinker, tailor, older spy” is a good one. I just love the genre. I’ve read a thousand John le Carré novels and Len Deighton novels. People undercover or people acting as spies is a favorite genre of mine. It was tricky because the point of this—and I and the writers reminded ourselves of this all the time—is not to tell a great spy story. If you want a great spy story, there are plenty. This was a story of a guy who finds a purpose late in life by unexpectedly taking this job, and then the people he meets and the relationships he forms and the way that it draws him out of his shell. So we tried to remind ourselves that it needs to be enough of a mystery that people feel like it’s a real case and there are suspects and red herrings and clues—all of that stuff. We really tried to make sure that it worked that way. But that’s not the point of it. We’re not expecting people to watch it because they want a great detective story. They can read The Maltese Falcon if that’s what they’re looking for.
What sort of research did you do to prepare?
We went to a number of assisted living facilities all over LA and Southern California. Really talked to a lot of folks. Had a consultant who we would ask questions of just to make sure we were getting things right and to understand the various duties that people perform. A lot of the stuff about the Dee character, played by Stephanie Beatriz, came directly from interviews and conversations that we had with people who work at these facilities. There’s a difference between the facility that our show is set in and the one from the documentary, which is a state-supported facility in Chile. It’s not going to be a one-to-one comparison and we didn’t want to just base it off of that. We talked to a lot of folks out here and they’re incredible. They have devoted their lives to caring for our loved ones at the most vulnerable time of their lives. I really wanted to get that right. I really wanted to portray the folks who have those jobs correctly because I think they do amazing work.
Why did you set it in San Francisco?
The facility in the Chilean documentary happens to be called the San Francisco Home for the Elderly. I’d watched the documentary once and then decided to adapt it, and then watched it again. I was thinking, “Where should this be set?” And then they were like, “Oh, it’s the San Francisco Home for the Elderly” and I took it as a sign. I wanted Charles to be a structural engineering professor and there’s a lot of famous architectural stuff in San Francisco, so it all made sense.
Did you actually shoot there at all?
We did. We went up for a couple weeks at the end of the season. We shot at a baseball game. We shot at the Golden Gate Bridge. We shot a bunch of iconic places and we picked a building that would be our exterior for Pacific View. It’s right on the top of one of the famous hills there.
You’ve done a lot of workplace comedies in the past. Would you define this as a workplace comedy?
I would say it’s half a workplace show and half a family show. Certainly 80 percent of the stuff that happens, it happens in one location and that’s usually the recipe for a workplace show. The themes and the ideas are a little more family show than I’ve done in the past, so it’s somewhere in between.
When you created and made so many shows, does it get easier when you do a new one?
Never, never, ever. Especially now, because the entire system of making TV has changed so dramatically. You used to get 22 episodes a year and you were shooting them and writing them while you were editing them and they were also airing at the same time and you were getting this constant feedback loop. For this, we’ve made eight, which is pretty typical. You might get 10, if you’re lucky. But if you only do 10 or eight, every episode has to be really meaningful. There’s no such thing as what I think of as a hangout show. There’s no Friends, no Seinfeld, no Everybody Loves Raymond, no Cheers. Those shows where the point of it was just to linger and hang out for a half an hour a week. That’s gone.
This is much closer to what movies are, which is one continuous story broken up into distinct pieces. Because of that, a spy story or a detective story is a good genre—there are cliffhangers and clues that drop in at the end of the episodes. The end of our second episode is something getting stolen and it propels you to the next episode. That is much more what every show now is. So even if it had gotten easier, which it hasn’t, we’d still be in a position of having to adjust to a new reality of how to write TV in general. I don’t want to sound like I’m complaining—it’s the best job in the world. It’s ridiculous that I still get to do this for a living. It’s just that the process of writing TV is changing all the time, so even if you’ve done it a lot, you still don’t feel like you have the hang of it. At least, I don’t feel like I have to have a hang of it yet. Maybe by the time I retire when I’m 79 I’ll be like, “Oh, good. I figured it out.”
With streaming, have you found that people continue to discover your show?
Especially over Covid. Covid was such a weird moment in the consumption of entertainment. For many reasons—that’s not the number one reason Covid was weird. But people trapped in their houses and needing things to do with their kids or their families or just being bored, shows like the ones I’ve worked on, The Office and Parks & Rec and Brooklyn Nine-Nine and The Good Place became nightly rituals. I swear to God, more people watch some of those shows over Covid than watched them when they were actually airing. I heard from so many people going, “I’m just catching up on the third season of Brooklyn Nine-Nine, it’s really funny.” And I was like, “Great, that came out in 2013.” But that is one benefit of this new world. Most things don’t disappear. They are still available and people can discover them, even though they are 20 years old.
When you look back on your work, do you see a through line that connects all of the shows?
One obvious through line to me would be the power of community. On Parks & Rec, the theme was communities need to share spaces and we need friendships and companions to survive and swim against the tide of isolation that had already begun back when we were making that show and has only gotten stronger. The theme of The Office, that Ricky [Gervais] and Stephen [Merchant] invented, was you might not have anything in common with the people you work with except that you share the same bit of carpet with them for eight hours a day, but often you end up seeing those people more than you see your own family. The theme of Brooklyn Nine-Nine was that the best cop is a team of cops. A lot of that show is having to help each other and how that was better than doing things alone. In The Good Place the four main characters were completely, wildly disparate people from disparate places who had to, over and over again, find each other and bond with each other in order to survive.
And the theme of A Man on the Inside is similar. The first time you see Charles, he goes through an entire day and he doesn’t say a word to another person. He has been resigned to the idea that that’s his life now. But by taking the job that he takes, his life grows. It’s like a baking loaf of bread, where he expands and his heart expands and he finds the value of friendships with other people. It’s not like I invented that. That’s a pretty common through line in a lot of art. But I think if there’s one thing that links all the shows I’ve worked on, it’s probably that sense of community.
Will there be more seasons of A Man on the Inside?
We don’t know if the show’s picked up yet, but the writing staff is already working on what season two would be. It’s a tricky situation because it’s a guy undercover so you can’t just repeat the same thing. There can’t be another case that’s at Pacific View. But it was always intended to be an ongoing show. There’s no shortage of people who have problems that need to be solved by private investigators, right? Charles starts off the year pretty bad at the job and he gets better as he goes along, so by the end of the year I think he’s in a place where another case could easily come along that he would be well suited for.
‘A Man on the Inside’ premieres on Netflix on November 21st.
