Mike Schur, the creator of “Parks and Recreation” and “The Good Place,” is like a kid on a Halloween sugar high. It’s the morning after the Dodgers won the World Series, and Schur — a baseball enthusiast with undying loyalty to the Boston Red Sox — is detailing the team’s extraordinary comeback in the fifth inning of Game 5 against the New York Yankees as a curious Ted Danson listens intently.
“I’m not proud of this, I don’t feel good about myself when I say things like this, but it is a part of who I am: I wanted to see sad Yankee fans,” Schur says after his mirthful recap. “I lived in New York for seven years, and in those seven years, the Yankees won the World Series four times. And I was miserable the whole time. That really just hardened my soul. My soul in this area is black and tarred over. I have no empathy. It’s the only place in my life where I feel really dark and evil.”
“I was watching ‘The Great British Bake Off,’” Danson deadpans.
“Did you feel the same way about whoever won or lost?” Schur asks.
“No,” Danson says. “But I felt that way about the Celtics during the Magic [Johnson] era.”
The power of human connection, from the camaraderie among amateur home bakers to the euphoria of sports fans supporting their team, is not just part of Schur and Danson’s repartee. It’s also a central pillar of the pair’s edifying new sitcom.
Four years after concluding their work together on NBC’s “The Good Place,” a philosophical comedy that explored morality and ethics through a group of deceased characters navigating the afterlife, Schur and Danson have reunited for a tender, humorous meditation on loneliness and the search for late-in-life purpose with “A Man on the Inside,” an eight-episode Netflix series premiering Nov. 21.
The sitcom, based on the Oscar-nominated 2020 documentary “The Mole Agent,” stars Danson as Charles, a retired professor and widower who has slipped into a monotonous, isolated routine and, afraid of burdening her, becomes emotionally estranged from his daughter (Mary Elizabeth Ellis). He gets a new lease on life when he’s tapped by a private investigator to go undercover at a San Francisco retirement home to dig into the theft of a missing heirloom.
Schur and his producing partner, Morgan Sackett, had been in the throes of adapting the 1989 baseball drama “Field of Dreams” for Peacock, but as it became clear that the series wasn’t moving forward, Sackett sent Schur an email asking if he‘d seen the Maite Alberdi-directed documentary. Set in Chile, the film chronicles the touching and unexpected journey of an 83-year-old widower, Sergio, as he answers a want ad in his local newspaper to infiltrate a local retirement home over the course of three months to see whether mistreatment is taking place. It turns out that he is an endearingly ineffective 007 wannabe, but what he uncovers for the viewer about relationships, loss and the treatment of the elderly is far more profound.
With its engaging lead, comic situations and elements of mystery, the documentary feature Oscar nominee could be headed to a narrative remake
Sackett felt strongly that they should remake it as a series, with Danson in the lead.
“I watched it and very quickly I saw the whole show,” Schur says, seated next to Danson on a plush sofa in a suite at Netflix’s headquarters in Hollywood. “Three weeks later, we had lunch with Ted. Sergio is a compelling and charismatic person. You can’t remake something unless you are sure you have someone who can re-create that performance, which in this case isn’t a performance — it’s just who he [Sergio] is. Only Ted could do this.”
At age 76, four decades removed from his formative turn as Sam Malone in “Cheers,” Danson was intrigued by what “A Man on the Inside” attempts to unpack: that older people still have plenty more to contribute to the world and derive a better quality of life through such a sense of belonging. It wasn’t until later that he wondered whether he was the right fit for the role. Sure, he was the right age, but as he describes it, “I’m a silly man who remains youthful by being silly. So will this fit with my age and what we think of when we think of retirement homes?”
Ultimately, the conflict between societal expectations and Danson’s persona only added to the subversion. It allowed Danson to forge ahead with his own career goals, at an age when people in other professions have usually long since retired.
“I have said to myself in the last two to three years, ‘I want to keep working for as long as I physically can because I want to know what it’s like to try to be funny at every age,’” he says. “I want to keep discovering that. I don’t want to be younger or hold onto who I was before. I want to age and to celebrate aging and celebrate aging with humor.”
The way the documentary finds harmony between the humor of the characters’ unexpected behavior and the sensitive issues it tackles struck Danson and Schur. They both point to the film’s opening moments, in which prospective moles attempt to demonstrate their proficiency with technology — taking photos with a cellphone, accessing the internet with WiFi — as an example of the spirit they are trying to lean into.
“That sequence was killer funny,” says Danson, who watched the picture with his wife, actor Mary Steenburgen. “By the way, as I say that, I realize I sound like I’m above that. I get it [technology], but as soon as a streaming service says, ‘Sorry, you have to log back in,’ I’m like ‘f—.’ I’m just outraged. I’m hitting buttons furiously.” (Danson can manage a FaceTime call, he points out.)
He continues: “But what I loved, loved, loved is how Mike totally captured Charles’ journey from taking his spying very seriously to realizing, ‘No, no, no. There’s something human here that I need to tend to.’”
To build out an eight-episode series, Schur and the writers played up the theft at the retirement home to create more room for clues, cliffhangers and the PI character, played by Lilah Richcreek Estrada. The decision also made possible a hero’s transformation for Charles, from a fumbling first-time spy to someone capable of solving a case. The ensemble also features Stephanie Beatriz (“Brooklyn Nine-Nine”) as the all-knowing managing director of the retirement home and Sally Struthers, Stephen McKinley Henderson, Susan Ruttan and John Getz as residents.
Schur says he had one rule as he and the writers set out to adapt the documentary into a half-hour sitcom: “We’re gonna have to change a bunch of stuff, we’re gonna have to expand a bunch of stuff, we’re going to create new characters that are not in the documentary, but the documentary is the North Star. That doesn’t mean the story as much as it means the feeling, which I don’t even know if I could describe, but I know what it is when I feel it.”
What really tugged at Schur is a reality that often sets in without notice: How our lives have gotten smaller in the modern age. Robert D. Putnam’s 2000 book “Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community,” which surveys how Americans have become increasingly disconnected from each other with the decline of social institutions like bowling leagues, had been a big influence in Schur’s crafting of “Parks and Recreation” and Leslie Knope’s guiding principle. That influence has carried over to “A Man on the Inside” too, he says.
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1. “A Man on the Inside” features an ensemble cast, including Stephen McKinley Henderson, left, as Calbert. (Colleen E. Hayes/Netflix) 2. Sally Struthers as Virginia, left, and Margaret Avery as Florence. (Colleen E. Hayes/Netflix)
The series opens with a montage of Charles going about his daily routine: waking up, getting dressed, perfectly measuring the beans for his coffee, doing a crossword puzzle, taking a nap, reading the paper (and clipping articles to send to his daughter), eating, reading, sleeping, then repeating the cycle again.
“You realize he didn’t speak out loud during that day. Human beings are meant to be convivial and social — the default setting for a lot of us is that we need other people around. Ted’s character Charles is a guy who’s still perfectly vibrant, very sharp, alive in the world, but his life has just gotten very small. And the question is — for him and for the audience — can he go through something that makes him see the value in living a bigger life?”
It’s something that has deep personal resonance for Schur.
“This kind of sounds crazy to say, but I feel this about myself — my life has gotten smaller over time,” he says, even as Danson points out how much he’s balancing professionally. “When you’re 25, when somebody says, ‘Hey, I’m gonna go do this thing. Do you want to go?’ You go. When you’re 49, the default setting is ‘No.’ You’re tired, it’s been a long week. You don’t think of it as shrinking your life, but that is what you’re doing. It’s natural. You have different priorities. Your priorities become your kids or your partner or your career or all of that. It’s not bad to have your life get smaller. But there are aspects of your life getting smaller that I think you don’t even notice.
“And I think COVID was an accelerant for this. We all got used to a much smaller life. When COVID ended, certainly, there was this pent-up feeling of like, ‘I want to go to a baseball game’ or ‘I want to go to a concert’ or whatever. But those are the big, flashy moments and the day-to-day stuff — How often do you go to dinner with your friends? How often do you take walks with a loved one? — those things got sanded down. And I don’t think I truly understood how much they got sanded down in my own life until I worked on this show.”
For his part, Danson is doing his best to combat the fears of aging he had in his youth — with an assist from Jane Fonda.
“At age 70, I remember thinking, ‘Oh, I need to find a landing spot. I need to slow down and take care,’” he says. “About the same time, Mary started with Jane on ‘The Book Club’ films. I met Jane, and she had her foot on the gas pedal at 80. She was 80 when I was turning 70. And she would do a full day of shooting on ‘Grace and Frankie’ and then get on a bus and go with some women to do something for the service industry in Sacramento. She was nonstop. And I thought, ‘Oh, right. Don’t slow down. Cross the finish line with force.’ Why plan for diminishment? We tell our kids they could grow up and be anything they want. But we stop saying that to ourselves at a certain age.”
In sharing the series with a wider audience, many of whom may not know about the original documentary, Schur hopes to bring attention to the community of healthcare workers who devote their lives, “selflessly and beautifully,” to caring for people in need. But even more crucially, he hopes it generates the same response that he and Danson had to seeing Sergio in “The Mole Agent.”
“Every single person who saw the documentary had the same feeling: ‘I need to call my mom, I need to call my dad, I need to call my grandma, grandpa; I need to spend more time with my kids.’ It is a remarkably universal feeling that comes out of the documentary, and I hope this same is true of the show, because that was the goal.”
Clearing his throat, Danson chimes in, at once teasing and sincere: “What I heard was the 50-and-under takeaway. I would like to add for the older folks: Keep your foot on the gas pedal. Live! This is your life until it ain’t. Go for it.”
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