In ‘A Man on the Inside’, Michael Schur solves a crime in a retirement community: NPR

While researching his new Netflix comedy series, A man on the inside, Television producer Michael Schur visited a number of retirement communities throughout California. He expected them to be sad places, but what he found surprised him.

These were “thriving communities of people who were very happy to be with each other and to be part of a community,” says Schur. “They were places of happiness and joy, pretty much.”

A man on the inside centers on a widowed retiree, played by Ted Danson, who goes undercover to solve a crime in a retirement community. The series was inspired by the 2020 Chilean documentary called The mole agent.

“One of the things that was remarkable to me about the documentary is that everyone I know who saw it had the same feeling, which was ‘I need to call my mother’ or ‘I need to call my grandfather’ or ‘ I should hang out with my kids more,” says Schur. “And it’s a rare piece of art, I think, that can make everybody have such a warm and positive feeling. So my longtime producing partner Morgan Sackett said, ‘We should remake it and have Ted (Danson) play the lead role. , ‘ and as soon as he said that, I just knew that he was right and that there was a very good, slightly fictionalized show that could hopefully give people that same feeling.”

Schur’s previous television credits include writing before The office, co-create and write to Parks and Recreation and Brooklyn Nine-Nine in addition to creating and writing for The good place. With all those hits, it’s obvious Schur could retire himself, but he says he enjoys it, he does too much to stop.

“Why wouldn’t I want to work? It’s sitting in a room with a dozen really funny people writing stories and making jokes,” he says. “I can’t believe I get to do this. It’s a miracle. It’s incredible. And I’m doing it because I love it.”

Interview highlights

About how comedy helped him be less of a rule follower

I have a very specific memory of being in kindergarten and being on the playground … and the teacher came out and said, “OK, everybody line up.” And I immediately went and stood right in front of her. And the other kids were like still painting around and hooting around and laughing and playing with square balls and stuff like that. And I remember thinking, what are they doing? This is insane. As the teacher just said, stand up and they don’t stand up. …

My first job was at Saturday Night Live. Saturday Night Live is a big, messy vortex of madness. Like it’s a big, 90-minute live variety show where part of the fun is people making mistakes and coloring outside the lines. … It was actually really good for me to be in a place at the beginning of my career where it was like this is not rigid. This world is not so much about following the rules.

On making the idea come true The good placewhich explores moral philosophy

I used to play this game while I was driving around LA traffic where someone would cut me off on the freeway or we would be in traffic and someone would pull on the shoulder and drive past me and cut the line and as a way to For to curb what you would call road rage, I would play a game in my head where I would say, “That guy just lost 10 points.” I imagined a scenario where there was some kind of omniscient observer of human behavior. And I satisfied my own anger or dissatisfaction with other people by imagining that it cost them in a cosmic way.

And then after Parks and Recreation ended and Brooklyn Nine-Nine was up and running … NBC very kindly said, you can do whatever you want and we’ll give you at least one season on the air. So I’d been thinking about the game I was playing in my head and other people and myself and judging my own behavior and doing things that I knew were a little unsafe and how many points I lost or how many points I got when i did it. certain things. And so it became the idea that I just liked most of the ideas that I had. And I just pursued it and thought, okay, this is going to be weird. I’m going to do a half-hour comedy about moral philosophy. But I don’t know, maybe it works. I kind of rolled the dice and I’m glad I did because the experience of working on it was wonderful.

On developing the concept for Parks and Recreation

I grew up in a pretty sleepy suburban town in the Northeast. And like, the government was great. I loved the government. Like the government, it filled the swimming pool and the public park that I swam in and organized Little League. And you know, my elementary school was great and my teachers were great. And I grew up understanding this strange demonization of the government. … I’m older now and I understand that the government has a lot of problems, but I just never understood why it was like this demonized force in America. And then I thought like … along the same lines as (The office‘s) Dunder Mifflin was a fictitious private sector company, we could essentially create a completely fictitious city and talk about it through the public sector world and just show what I’ve always believed, which is like the government is just a bunch of people in an office trying to do things to make the city better.

On Parks and Recreation reflecting the Obama years

I think that show is very much a time and a place. There are people who use revisionist history to claim that it was always hopelessly naive or something. But that was the mood of the country at the time we did that show … It wasn’t wide-eyed optimism, it was cautious optimism. Like Leslie, Knope was extremely optimistic about the possibility of making people’s lives better. But she was also constantly confronted with the impossibility of it, because people are grochy. They didn’t want her to do whatever she did. They threw obstacles in her way. … We didn’t pretend everything was rosy and fantastic. What we were trying to say was that being hopeful and optimistic is a better way to go through life than it is to be pessimistic.

On making fun of NPR on Parks and Recreation

There were several times that Leslie would go on the local NPR station over the years and it was just our chance to, like, make little jokes about the reality of listening to NPR. … But it was always fun making NPR jokes. It has always been a favorite exercise. We kind of had to stop ourselves from making her go too much, because if we could have done that in every episode and had plenty to make fun of—lovely.

About how the shift from network to streaming has changed television writing

The biggest change is of course just the switch to the streaming model. you know The officewe did 28 episodes a year, I think, or maybe 30. The typical season was 22 episodes or 24 episodes. And now a season of television is usually eight half hours, or maybe 10. And it just completely changes the way you tell stories, right? The advantage TV always had over film was that you could successfully watch a set of characters live and change and grow over many, many, many years.

Like, people are still watching Friends because … you see people go from their mid-20s to their mid-30s, and they have relationships, and those relationships get tangled and complicated and end. … During COVID, people revisited old shows that had 200 episodes like Friendpp. and Bowl and whatever. And you could sit under COVID and watch an episode every night for five or six months. And it was incredibly valuable and I think it gave people a lot of comfort. And that is what we lose. And that’s what I mourn the most about the new system is that we’re just losing what I think was the inherent advantage that TV storytelling had over film or anything else.

Lauren Krenzel and Susan Nyakundi produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Beth Novey adapted it for the web.