Ted Danson’s amazing Netflix show looks like a sitcom but is anything but.

In Maite Alberdi’s documentary The mole agentAn elderly Chilean man goes undercover in a nursing home to investigate allegations that one of the residents is being abused and taken advantage of. IN A man on the insidethe new Netflix series based – very loosely – on Alberdi’s film, the stakes have been lowered considerably. Instead of elder abuse, Charles Nieuwendyk (Ted Danson), a retired engineering professor and recent widower, is hired to root out the person behind the disappearance of a ruby ​​necklace that may not have been worth much in the first place. As is the case with the other worlds created by Michael Schur, no one here is cruel or evil in any particularly harmful way – even The good place‘s demons were more like happy mockingbirds than the embodiment of evil. Tempers occasionally flare and misunderstandings abound, but for the most part everyone tries their best, and that’s rarely enough.

When he is first hired by a private eye looking for an accomplice, The mole agentSergio, who is in his 80s, struggles with the simplest of tasks: just mastering a smartphone’s photo app is a challenge, never mind making a FaceTime call. Charles is a little more tech savvy, but while he knows his way around an iPhone, he’s completely lost when it comes to the underworld. When asked by his future employer, Julie (Lilah Richcreek Estrada), to take a secret photo of two strangers, Charles ends up posing for selfies with them, reflecting both his lack of coolness and his longing for human connection. A year after his wife’s death, Charles lives alone in his spacious modernist house, reading spy novels and cutting out a single newspaper article to send to his daughter, Emily (Mary Elizabeth Ellis), with a scribbled notation in the margin: “Fascinating!” She is only a two-hour drive away, but she’s busy raising three teenage boys, and besides, her mom, she explains, was the one she could talk to. you would go to for the most efficient directions from point A to point B.

Underlying A man on the inside‘s eight half-hour episodes, which feature names and faces familiar from previous Schur shows such as Parks and Recreation and Brooklyn Nine-Nineis an understanding that life is hard enough without introducing the conflicts and threats that are usually drama. The biggest threat to an elderly person’s well-being, explains the home’s director, Didi (Stephanie Beatriz), isn’t illness or injury: It’s loneliness, a condition that survival only makes more acute. If Charles makes a lousy spy, especially at first, it’s partly because he’s unpracticed in the art of submission, but it’s also, we understand, because his people skills have atrophied over the years as he’s swapped the university’s lecture hall for a quiet scramble at the breakfast table (he does it in ink, of course) and spent months with his grief as his primary companion. He’s supposed to keep a low profile and not draw attention to the other residents, but when a man who looks like Ted Danson walks into a facility where women outnumber men, that’s an impossibility, and the attention hits him like a narcotic. – yes, that and the weed he ends up smoking after his welcome party.

The show evolves gently during its first season as Charles fends off a crush from another resident (Sally Struthers) and the seething hostility of her one-time boyfriend (John Getz). He makes a friend in Calbert (Stephen McKinley Henderson), talks over backgammon about their strained relationship with their children, and an ally in Beatriz’s Didi, an endlessly patient and optimistic administrator who burns off stress by lying on the floor beneath her. desk with a pair of noise-canceling headphones. The investigation never goes away completely, but because the presence of a hard-hearted thief who swipes precious heirlooms from the most vulnerable would explode the series’ softly relaxing tones, you quickly realize that the mystery will not be a whodunit, but an explanation of why the was not what we thought it was. In the first episode, Didi takes Charles on a tour of the facility, and the way he declines her offer to show him the memory care wing of the building tells you all you need to know about where the story is actually going.

If streaming shows suffer from an over-reliance on twists, be desperate to drive viewers towards the Next Episode button rather than risk a hint of closure, A man on the inside errs in the opposite direction and rolls out at a leisurely stroll. Without the structure of a network show’s act breaks or the broadcast sitcom’s imperative to always drive to the next laugh line, the series just amiably cruises along, counting on you to soak in its warm bath rather than risk changing the channel and get a chill. (The silliest gags are reserved for the credits, where several characters are given last names that are never spoken on screen, like Chagughlaight-Accourse and Autumnal-Stojakovic.) But once you grasp the fact that it’s a cozy sitcom mystery clothes, you can just enjoy heat.