For the funny, emotional and heartfelt Netflix series A Man on the Inside, starring Ted Danson, showrunner Michael Schur (who also worked with Danson on The Good Place) was inspired by the Oscar-nominated documentary, The Mole Agent, about an 83-year-old widower in Chile who infiltrates a nursing home on a spy mission. Bringing the story to San Francisco, Danson plays Charles, a retired professor and widower who answers a newspaper ad from private detective Julie (Lilah Richcreek Estrada) to conduct a secret investigation of the Pacific View retirement residence.
In addition to the charismatic Danson, Mary Elizabeth Ellis is Charles’ daughter, Emily, and Eugene Cordero plays Emily’s husband Joel. The cast of characters in Pacific View are played by All in the Family and Gilmore Girls icon Sally Struthers, Susan Ruttan, Stephen McKinley Henderson, Veronica Cartwright, John Getz, Lori Tan Chinn, Margaret Avery, to name just a few. Additionally, Brooklyn Nine-Nine alum, Stephanie Beatriz, takes on the role of Didi, the managing director of Pacific View.
‘A sign of really, really great writing, you don’t use people as props’
What’s particularly impressive and rewarding about A Man on the Inside is that from the youngest to the oldest cast member, its stars prove that great storytelling shouldn’t be limited by age.
“I think we are very youth obsessed in this country, and I think it’s changing, and I hope that we are helping that catalyst to take off,” Lilah Richcreek Estrada told Yahoo Canada. “Just because you hit a certain age doesn’t mean you expire from life.”
“All of our older guest cast, they’re incredible, and they’re just as sharp and just as funny, and bring years and decades of experience, and they are the ones who started out in this genre. Like, Cheers is one of the first great multi-cams. So the fact that we get a person who did that, and gets to bring it into this new type of genre, and this single-cam, more grounded type of comedy, it just makes it more well rounded. I think it makes it far more interesting.”
“I think the reason people are responding to this show so much is because there is this beautiful weave of people from their 70s and 80s all the way down to 10, 12 year-olds,” Ellis added. “So there’s something for everyone. Everyone who watches this will be able to identify with some character in the show.”
“One thing that I’m really excited for when people watch this show is that they’re going to be like, ‘Oh my god, Sally Struthers, Lori, John!’ These people that we haven’t gotten to see on television in so long are popping up and they are sharp.”
Danson also praised Schur for the way he fully constructed each character in this series.
“A sign of really, really great writing, you don’t use people as props, or you don’t use them just as functionary things to make the plot go forward,” Danson stressed. “Every one of Mike’s characters, no matter how much time they have on screen, is a full fledged character.”
“People delight in coming to work with Mike for like a day, even if they may be on Broadway at night. They love coming to do a part for a day because it is fully human, and that’s what makes this so special to me. … Everybody has their moment to blossom, and it’s just a delight to be around that as an actor.”
A particular highlight for Danson was working with Struthers who plays Virginia. She is very much the most vivacious person Pacific View with a larger than life personality, and is quick to chat up Charles.
“In Sally’s case, I’d grown up watching her, the iconic All in the Family, and what I loved about Sally is she can go anywhere,” Danson said. “She can go, ‘You want broad, I’ll give you broad. You want subtle and moving and gently funny. I’ll give you that.’ … It was a delight.”
‘This show holds aging with such joy and such optimism’
We know that sometimes watching a TV show or movie can help us process things that are happening in our lives, and A Man on the Inside is the perfect example of that.
What Schur is able to depict with incredible accuracy and care is that uncomfortable moment when the roles between a parent and a child reverse. When the child has to be the one caring for their parent. It was that specific relationship that the showrunner was particularly compelled to explore in this show.
“It’s exactly where I am in my life. My parents are in their 70s. My my wife’s father passed away, but her mom is in her 80s. This is what we and all of our friends are going through,” Schur explained. “And one of the main things I thought about in adapting the documentary was, we have to expand it, add characters, add storylines. The first thing I thought of was, Charles’s daughter has to be a character, and we have to understand her role in this.”
“What I’m describing is the best case scenario of how we live, which is that you depend on your parents for so long for emotional support and for financial support and for everything, and then at some point the relationship flips, and suddenly your parents are depending on you for those things. And that’s the sandwich generation that I’m in right now, it’s not explored a ton in a real way. And so I thought, well, that’s the first thing I want to add, is within this story, there needs to be a real investigation of this father-daughter relationship, and from both sides, not just from Charles’s side, from his daughter’s side too. And how she’s grappling with the loss of her mom, just as he’s grappling with the loss of his wife. That just seemed a very rich vein to explore.”
Ellis also identified with being at that place in your life, when being a daughter means taking care of the people who raised you.
“I’m in the place in my life where my character is in her life. I have a kid. I’m taking care of my kid. I have a relationship with my husband that needs to be tended to. I work. I’m a person, and also my parents are getting a little older, and I have a grandmother who’s 97 that I’m helping take care of,” she said. “I understand where my character is coming from and how lucky am I as a person to get to explore these themes in the safety of a character on a television show, and to get to practice what I really want in my own life, which is to have open and loving communication with my family. What do you need? How can I help you? What do I need? How can you help me? And how can we do this together?”
“This show holds aging with such joy and such optimism and with such love, and that’s really important in the world, especially right now.”
‘A Man on the Inside’ Season 2?
A Man on the Inside is a pleasure to watch. Schur is one of the best at crafting a show that is able to really authentically portray these complex moments in our lives with incredible detail and accuracy, so it’s easy to completely be immersed in and moved by the story.
But the showrunner also leaves us with an ending to the show’s first season where the door open for more seasons to come. That’s certainly our hope for the future and Schur seems to have some ideas for what he wants to continue explore.
“If we should be so lucky to get another season, there is no shortage of ideas in my head, in the writers heads and in the actors heads,” Schur said. “We pitched this as a show that could and hopefully would continue for a long time, and we’ll see what happens.”