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 that premiered last week.
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.
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 ‘(Expletive).’ 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.
“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.”
