‘A Man on the Inside’: Ted Danson and Mike Schur Discuss Finding the Right Tone and Season 2 Options

[This story contains spoilers from the finale of Man on the Inside.]

When Mike Schur watched The Mole Agent, an Oscar-nominated documentary about a Chilean man who goes undercover in a retirement community to investigate a possible crime, the film “made me feel a certain way.”

“When I talked to other people about it, I realized that they all felt the same exact way. And the way that I would describe how we felt was ‘I need to call my mom,’” Schur (The Good Place, Parks and Recreation) tells The Hollywood Reporter. “Everybody had that same reaction. That’s a really rare piece of art that makes everyone feel something similar.”

Schur’s producing partner, Morgan Sackett, had pitched him the idea of adapting The Mole Agent as a TV series starring Ted Danson, whom they’d worked with on The Good Place. That notion sold Schur immediately, he says, but in thinking more about the documentary, he also realized there was a lot of room to expand on its story.

“You don’t learn anything about the private detective, really. There’s a scene in the documentary early on where Sergio is talking to his daughter, and they have a very brief conversation, but that’s all you see of her,” Schur notes. “It felt like a bunch of files on a desktop — ‘Oh, I can click on that and open it up, and I’ll bet there’s a lot of interesting stuff inside.’ So it both had a wonderful tone and a bunch of really good themes and interesting ideas, and also, I felt like there was a lot of stuff that I could expand on and explore.”

Danson was bought in right away as well, and the result was A Man on the Inside, which premiered Nov. 21 and was Netflix‘s most-watched English-language series in its opening week. Danson plays Charles, a widower who answers an ad from a private investigator (Lilah Richcreek Estrada) to go undercover at the Pacific View retirement home in San Francisco, investigating the theft of a resident’s valuable jewelry. As Charles tries to solve the case, he endears himself to several of the residents — played by, among others, Sally Struthers, Stephen McKinley Henderson, Margaret Avery, John Getz, Lori Tan Chinn and Susan Ruttan — and starts to re-establish ties with his daughter, Emily (Mary Elizabeth Ellis).

In separate interviews, Danson and Schur talked with THR about the tone of A Man on the Inside, bringing experiences from their own lives to the show and where the series could go if it continues past this season.

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Ted, is it correct that you signed onto this before Mike had really written anything?

TED DANSON That would be pretty much my truth. I wouldn’t admit it around serious actors, but I would do pretty much any — no, I would do anything for Mike Schur. I truly mean that. I appreciate who he is and how he goes through life, and I appreciate him as a writer. Morgan Sackett, his producing partner, called me and said they want to talk to me about this. And we had lunch, and I went home and watched the documentary, The Mole Agent, with my wife, Mary [Steenburgen], and we just fell in love with it. But I was on board no matter what.

There’s probably a version of this story that’s more specifically about the mystery and more kind broadly jokey than what you ended up making. I’m curious how you honed in on the tone of the series.

MIKE SCHUR That was a big discussion point in the writers room. The point of the documentary is not the whodunit. In fact, most people who watch the documentary don’t even remember what the answer is. So I was like, look, we’re going to have a mystery here, and for people who like mysteries — I’m one of those people — it should feel satisfying. There should be clues and suspects and red herrings and missteps, and the answer to who did it should be satisfying in some way, because you don’t want to promise people a mystery and then not deliver an actual mystery. But importantly, that’s not the point. It’s not the point of the documentary or the show. The point of the documentary, and the show, should be that a man whose life was getting very small, and he was shutting himself down and closing himself off from the world, goes on an adventure, and in doing so, meets a lot of people and has a lot of experiences that expand his world and make him feel like there is more to life than doing a crossword puzzle alone at the kitchen table.

DANSON I knew he was going to expand it. I knew he needed more characters, and that [Charles’] daughter would be a bigger part, and I knew about the characters that were going to be added so that it could become a series. I knew that the tone and the sweetness and the heart of it was, as he likes to say, our north star — that he wanted to make sure that was what we captured, no matter what, and I knew that [Charles] was going to be so excited about being a spy and so terrible at it, and that would be the basis of the humor guiding us through an Inherently kind of sad conversation.

SCHUR I said early on in the writers room that we’re going to wrap up this case in the cold open of the last episode. It is not going to be an Agatha Christie story where the last scene is him wheeling and pointing to someone and saying, “You’re the one who took the necklace!” We’re not going to do that. We’re going to wrap it up at the beginning, and then the rest of the finale is going to be following through on the much more important emotional stories that we’ve been tracking, which are about his friendships and his life at Pacific View, and the relationship with his daughter, and all of the stuff that actually really matters.

Mike, you’ve worked with casting director Allison Jones [who’s also a consulting producer on A Man on the Inside] on pretty much all the shows you’ve done, and she’s kind of the best there is. But it’s not often that you see a cast of actors that are mostly in their 60s and 70s. What was the process of finding the actors you wanted?

SCHUR We met with [Jones] pretty early on, I think maybe before I had even written the pilot. I explained the premise to her and said Ted is going to be the star, and that I thought it would be pretty hard. We’re going to need a dozen really good actors over the age of 70, and many of them over the age of 80, to sell these really important parts. These aren’t like one or two lines in an episode, but main characters. And she was like, “Oh, no problem. That’s fine.” She said there are so many great actors out there, and you’ll have your pick of the litter, because there aren’t that many big, juicy parts for main characters in TV shows who are 75 and up. So I thought, well, geez, Allison sure seems confident, and generally speaking, I’ve never gone wrong trusting Allison Jones. And she was right.

Ted, had you worked with Sally Struthers or John Getz, any of your fellow Pacific View residents before?

DANSON I hadn’t worked with Sally, but it felt like I knew her, just from having watched her. She was astounding. She could anything you wanted — she could be broad, silly, loving, touching, subtle. You know, it was amazing to watch her work. John Getz, I had come up with in New York when we were young actors. Susan Ruttan, I loved her on LA Law, and she did a brilliant job. And there were so many others that I had actually worked with over the years.

I thought the relationship between Charles and Calbert [Stephen McKinley Henderson] was something really special, what you and Stephen built.

Stephen is one of those actors — his depth of truthfulness on stage when he’s acting is [such that] you’re going to just fall into it, and you yourself get a little better.

I would also think it would be a lot of fun getting to play these older characters who still have full lives and get up to a lot of nonsense.

DANSON It was fun for my character and for everyone’s characters too. It was fun to play that and to show that — and it wasn’t just [made up]. It’s real. Mike and Morgan went around to three or four retirement homes, and, you know, sexual encounters were quite frequent, happy hour was a given and people drank and carried on. Smoking weed on top of the building is one of my favorite scenes, but [that’s] not unheard of.

There could be almost an entire show built around Charles and his interactions with his daughter and her family. What was it about that part of the show that hit home for you or allowed you to really dig into that side of things?

DANSON I’ve experienced that in my life, being corrected by my eldest daughter years ago for how I was with her. I’d kind of run in, love her, hug her, and run out. The conversations to her felt hit and run. I had to stop and go, she’s right. So I understand thinking that you’re doing an amazing job of loving your child — in Charles’ case, he’s protecting his daughter, he thinks, from all his sadness. He doesn’t want to burden her. I do get that. I get the compartmentalizing — I’ve compartmentalized my life at times. I’ve experienced it recently, where a grief, a sadness, that a trauma that happened. I thought I could talk about it, but I hadn’t really allowed myself to fully feel that grief, and I was overwhelmed with it recently. And luckily, I was able, able to talk with the people involved and with Mary, but I totally understand all of that.

The relationship between Emily and Joel [Eugene Cordero] and their united front against their teenage sons feels very lived-in and real too.

SCHUR That whole wing of the show is basically my life with my wife. We have two kids, a 16-year-old boy and a 14-year-old girl. The scene in the second episode where the youngest son, Wyatt [Wyatt Yang], doesn’t want pasta with red sauce, he wants it with butter and parmesan, and then just wants peanut butter and jelly, and then is told he can have it if he makes it himself, and then just absolutely flails at the most basic of tasks — that’s pretty much verbatim from my life.

That was a big thing that I knew we wanted to add to the show, partly because that’s where I am now in my life, but also because I think a big part of the Charles story is what he says to her in the sixth episode. She wants to know why can’t you share these feelings with me and this sadness of what you’re going through? And he says, I don’t want to be a burden. And she says, but not being close to you is the burden. I think that feeling of “I don’t want to be a burden” is a thing that a lot of folks in their 70s feel about their kids, because they do have their own lives and their own marriages and their own kids and all the stresses that come with careers and parenting and everything else. They tend to retreat a little bit, some of them, because they don’t. The last thing in the world they want to do is be another problem for their own kids.

It’s just this messy, tangled web. No one’s wrong, no one’s doing anything bad or malicious. It’s just a kind of thorny bush that you’ve got to get through. The focus was always that the show is about Charles, but we tried to dimensionalize it by laying in these other aspects of his life that were also important, about his daughter and his grandkids and her job and her marriage. When you’re talking about the life of a 75-year-old guy and all of the forces that are kind of buffeting him from different directions, that’s a big one. His kids and grandkids and their problems, that factors very much into how he thinks of himself and what he should be doing or not doing. We kept those characters alive throughout the season because we wanted to investigate them as themselves, but really we’re sort of investigating them as aspects of Charles’ life that need to be attended to, that are not being attended to because he is sort of emotionally closed off.

That part of the show hit home for me as well. My parents were sort of like Charles, in that they were kind of buttoned up and didn’t like to talk about uncomfortable or upsetting things too much. My brothers and I would talk and be like, “Did you know that mom was sick for a whole week?”

DANSON My favorite one in my family was, “You’ll be happy to know your mother’s out of the hospital.” [Laughs]

These eight episodes end in a satisfying place, and if nothing happens from here, it’s a complete story. But there are obviously some open avenues you could take the show if Netflix wants to do more. Have you talked much with them or with the other writers and Morgan about where you would want to take a second season?

DANSON All of this depends on being picked up, obviously. Netflix has its system, so we won’t know that for a month, but we seem to be doing really well. We have, but it’s one of those things where you don’t want to go too far down that road, and it’s more of a fingers crossed kind of conversation.

SCHUR We pitched it to them as a series, not a limited thing. We won’t know the reality of that for a couple weeks at least, probably more like a month or two. But before the season was even over, we had started saying [a second season] could be this, could be this, and trying to figure out how it would be different and how it would be the same. He can’t go undercover at Pacific View anymore. Obviously, that ship has sailed. But what you have at the end of the season is a 76-year-old man with a new lease on life and a new sense of purpose and a new kind of fledgling career as an undercover detective. … You have a lot of building blocks for future seasons.

I told Netflix, I’ll do this forever if you want to keep paying me to write seasons of a show where Ted Danson is an undercover detective. I will sign up for this through 2050 if you let me.  

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A Man on the Inside is now streaming all episodes on Netflix.