written by Daniel Fienberg, The Hollywood Reporter
One week after breaking audience records by televising either Logan or Jake Paul (TRULY, I couldn’t care less) pummeling Mike Tyson in the ring, Netflix is delivering a much more compassionate portrait of the challenges of aging and the dangers of elder abuse.
It will be easy to dub the Mike Schur-created A Man on the Inside as Only Robberies at the Nursing Home — count how many of your friendly neighborhood TV critics make that identical joke. But it wouldn’t be inappropriate, and it also wouldn’t be a criticism. It would actually be high praise.
Like Only Murders in the Building, A Man on the Inside is a semi-comic look at people who combat loneliness by thrusting their lives into an established genre that they adore. It’s a perfect star vehicle for, simultaneously, its beloved leading man and its impeccably cast ensemble.
It’s also the exceedingly rare series-length expansion of a feature film in which the leap in media feels wholly justified. The elongation of the story adds richness, rather than merely chasing an established audience.
In that respect, it helps that Schur has chosen to adapt a piece of IP that isn’t really IP. A Man on the Inside is based on 2020’s The Mole Agent, but how much of a built-in viewership does your typical Chilean documentary have, even one nominated for an Academy Award? I like to believe that this boost in exposure for the Maite Alberdi-directed film is actually Netflix’s apology for winning the Oscar that year with My Octopus Teacher, among the worst movies to ever be recognized in the documentary category. But that’s neither here nor there.
A Man on the Inside stars Ted Danson as Charles, a retired San Francisco-based engineering professor who has been retreating into himself since his wife died a year earlier. Daughter Emily (Mary Elizabeth Ellis), who has always had a benign but strained relationship with her dad, urges him to try something new. Anything.
Then Charles notices an ad in the newspaper. “Wanted: Investigative Assistant. Male aged 75-85. Must have phone.”
The notice turns out to have been placed by private investigator Julie (Lilah Richcreek Estrada), whose client (Marc Evan Jackson’s Evan) is worried his mother’s valuable necklace has been stolen. Julie needs somebody capable of going undercover at the Pacific View Retirement Community for a month to find the item and the culprit.
Charles is the right age. He knows how to text pictures from his phone. And since one of the things he’s introduced doing is reading a John le Carré novel, we know that he’s a big fan of espionage.
After a few training montages and a brief interview with facility manager Didi (Stephanie Beatriz), Charles moves into Pacific View to begin the process of meeting the staff and fellow residents, who are variously enthusiastic and sad, bored and over-programmed, lonely and horny. They’re complex people, in other words, and it’s up to Charles to target the suspects and solve the mystery. Wait. Mysteries are what they solve in Only Murders in the Building. Charles loves spy stories, so this is a mission that he needs to complete. Soon, however, this becomes more than just a job.
I found Alberdi’s documentary to be emotionally effective but formally unsettling. The layers of contrivance necessary to get the titular mole agent and various cameras into the senior home left me constantly aware of the artificiality of moments that were meant to be real. The story was good and the characters were good, but in drawing attention to its process, the movie lost my belief in its designation as “nonfiction.”
Schur, and a talented team of writers and directors whose credits include many Schur-produced favorites like The Good Place and Parks and Recreation, get to simply dispatch with the pretense and steer into the careful crafting of a delicate tone.
There are obvious and broad jokes related to being old here, but they abide by certain rules. Yes, the show might want you to chuckle at elderly people not always knowing how to use their phones, or at their generational love for hard candies with deafening wrappers. But there’s nothing gross or pathetic in this version of television maturity.
Put a different way: Probably 90 percent of the time, A Man on the Inside isn’t laughing at its characters, or at least not for reasons related to their advanced age. It almost never feels condescending and it never feels cruel. This isn’t at all surprising, because if anything characterizes Mike Schur’s worldview, it’s a generosity of spirit towards nearly everybody other than Councilman Jeremy Jamm.
Plus, while this is very definitely a comedy, it’s one with an abiding undercurrent of sadness and discomfort. Charles is grieving a wife who died from complications related to Alzheimer’s, and the drama rooted in dementia is one of the things that Charles and the series take most seriously. As was the case in the documentary (and as is the case in reality), the home is a place of transition. Characters die and conditions worsen.
“After the fifth, 10th, 20th person moves on, it just becomes part of the background of your life. It’s where we are, Charles,” Elliott (John Getz), Charles’ initial septuagenarian antagonist, tells him.
As frequently as A Man on the Inside wants to make you laugh, it also wants to make you cry. Though the line between emotional manipulation and outright mawkishness is the most precarious of all, the series generally stays on the right side. You’re never entirely unaware of it trying to move you in a certain direction, but whenever I was overcome by the sniffles, they felt as close to earned as would be possible when you only have eight half-hours in which to ground things.
That’s where A Man on the Inside benefits from the not-even-vaguely-secret weapon that is casting directors Allison Jones and Emily Buntyn. The pleasure of watching the remarkable Stephen McKinley Henderson, as Charles’ backgammon buddy Calbert, get to instantly inhabit a character with a fully realized arc cannot be understated. Were this simply a buddy dramedy about Danson and Henderson going to different San Francisco locations, with no other plot to speak of, I would watch it in perpetuity.
It’s a treasure to behold Sally Struthers get to do silly, flibbertigibbet Sally Struthers things, and then contribute emotional depth beyond that. It’s a joy to see somebody realize or remember that Margaret Avery is and was an attention-grabbing star, that Susan Ruttan can still slay comedy or drama, that recognizable background players like Getz, Lori Tan Chinn and more can be in the foreground instead.
Aging in Hollywood doesn’t mean the same thing as it does in real-world Chile, and it’s hard to shake the feeling that even if most members of the cast are in their 70s, they tend toward the younger-looking and younger-seeming side of the ledger. But is it 76-year-old Ted Danson’s fault that it’s very hard to take him seriously as 76, much less to believe him as a “retiree” when the past decade of his career has been among his most prolific and productive?
So much of A Man on the Inside hinges on Danson’s ability to blend Charles’ giddiness at each piece of spycraft, his underlying melancholy and the growth he experiences in opening himself up to a new world. And, of course, he is funny and properly debonair as a man who could walk into a retirement community and instantly become kibble to all of the female residents.
There’s appealing sweetness to his scenes with Ellis, and great comic energy to his scenes with the excellently prickly Estrada, a complete revelation in what is easily her highest profile role to date. I’m assuming Beatriz will be a revelation as well to anybody who only knows her as Rosa from Brooklyn Nine-Nine — though if you’re already familiar with her actual voice and mannerisms, her work here will just confirm her versatility. Especially in the sixth episode, it’s on full display.
After eight chapters, A Man on the Inside sets itself up as either acceptably close-ended or immediately poised for a second season, and this a rare situation where I would be fine with either outcome. Like Only Murders in the Building, it’s a premise with some open avenues but also the potential to tempt fate with any effort at repetition. But I think I’m ready for more.
Oh, and for any viewers who enjoy the show, but wish it were a hair funnier — a reasonable reaction, especially since one person’s “It’s not mawkish at all!” can easily be a different person’s “My God, it’s so mawkish!” — be sure to say, “Screw you, Netflix Autoplay” and watch the episodes all the way through the credits. All I’ll say is that if you know Schur and his team, you know they enjoy funny names.
Featuring work from editor Sue Federman
