A Man on the Inside review – Ted Danson is comedy perfection in this incredibly cute show | Television

If Michael Schur has a trademark, it is bone-deep niceness. A decade and a half ago, he turned Parks and Recreation from a lackluster Office clone into a classic, simply by making the characters more upbeat. Next came The Good Place, a show about reaching heaven through self-improvement. After that he wrote a book called How to Be Perfect. The man knows his stuff.

So when it was announced that Schur’s newest project would be a Netflix series called A Man on the Inside, niceness was always going to be a key factor. But the level he reaches here is unprecedented, even by his standards. This show is Schur planting a flag as Sir Edmund Hillary of nice.

A Man on the Inside is the story of Charles (Ted Danson), a lonely, retired widower who takes a job with a private detective who infiltrates a nursing home to discover the identity of a thief. Only, as you might have guessed, the job gives him purpose, and the residents give him companionship, and everything is lovely and sweet and warm-hearted. The series is based on the Oscar-nominated documentary The Mole Agent, because all this happened in real life.

The problem is that the Mole Agent is already wonderful. Which raises the same question that Taika Waititi’s film The Next Goal wins, similarly based on a superlative documentary. What’s the point of making it at all?

Let’s approach it like a detective. The key to getting A Man on the Inside greenlit, you suspect, is that it allows Schur and Danson to work together again. After all, The Good Place revived Danson’s career, allowing him to play suave and dapper, which he does again here. Perhaps other actors would have been tempted to lean more into the character’s advancing years, playing Charles as crooked and incapable. Danson, meanwhile, still has the energy of a man half his age. His timing and spark are as spot on as ever and he practically walks through the episodes. It’s as good a vehicle as he’s ever had.

Another point might be that when Schur creates a series in a retirement home, he gets to fill out his cast with some of the greatest character actors of the last 50 years. There’s Stephen McKinley Henderson, who’s been in everything from Lincoln to Ladybird. There’s John Getz from The Fly and Born on the Fourth of July and a million other things. There’s Lori Tan Chinn, from Orange is the New Black and Awkwafina is Nora from Queens. And Clyde Kusatsu, who you’ll undoubtedly recognize from any of his 317 acting credits. Sally Struthers is in this. Susan Ruttan is in this. These artists have all been severely underserved by the entertainment industry. That they now get their time in the sun – and on a show about older people with a lot left to offer – is a solid plus.

The thornier question is whether A Man on the Inside succeeds. If you come at it as a fan of Schur’s previous work, maybe not. This is not a show for belly laughs. Instead, it’s lightly humorous in the way that Bill Lawrence’s Apple TV+ shows are. It’s charming and sweet and full of characters who appear to be multi-millionaires with impeccable taste in home decor. It’s funny, but you don’t want to annoy your neighbors by laughing at it.

Stripped of those expectations, however, there’s a tenderness here that will creep up and quietly wipe you out if you’re not careful. The heavy thread that runs through the series is dementia. When it chooses to play that card fully, which happens more and more as the series wears on, A Man on the Inside becomes a weeper. If nothing else, it definitely got to me.

Who knows where A Man on the Inside will go from here. There is certainly anticipation for a renewal – the final scene makes that clear – but there doesn’t seem to be much of a way forward. In the end, the mystery has been solved, Charles has regained his connection to the world, and (most importantly) the source material has been exhausted. However, Schur is the master of the second-season reinvention, having turned both The Good Place and Parks and Recreation on their heads after their first outings. A Man on the Inside has so much promise that we have to hope he is able to pull off the trick again.

A Man on the Inside is on Netflix.