He’s in a good place.
Mike Schur, best known for writing on “The Office,” and creating “Parks and Recreation,” “Brooklyn Nine-Nine” and “The Good Place,” enters the world of retirement homes for his new Netflix show, “A Man on the Inside.” It’s based on the documentary “The Mole Agent.”
The show touches on “a lot of themes that I have been thinking about, as I think many people have: aging in general,” Schur, 49, told The Post.
“My parents are [the main character] Charles’ age, roughly speaking, and so were many of my friends’ parents. And then, the theme of loneliness, which I think is a really big issue in the country and the world right now.”
Premiering Wednesday, Nov 21, “A Man on the Inside” follows Charles (Ted Danson) a lonely widower and retired professor who gets a new lease on life when he’s tasked with becoming an undercover spy in a retirement home, much to the bewilderment of his adult daughter, Emily (Mary Elizabeth Ellis).
“Brooklyn Nine-Nine” star Stephanie Beatriz rounds out the cast as Diddi, who runs the retirement facility, while Sally Struthers plays Virginia, a fellow resident who has a crush on Charles.
The show is the latest of Schur’s work to center on a zany cast of characters in a hyper-specific setting.
“I think a mistake that people make sometimes in trying to develop a show is that they say, ‘I want to do a show on the International Space Station. Wouldn’t that be cool?’ And it sounds cool, but then you’re like, ‘well, who cares where it is? Who are the people? What are they talking about? What do they care about?’” Schur explained.
“As opposed to thinking like, ‘I want to do a show about loneliness and aging and family and adult relationships.’ The perfect setting for this is a retirement community with a guy who had kind of given up on having another phase of his life.”
Schur said that his last show, the afterlife comedy “The Good Place,” came from his idea to mull over what it means to be a good person.
“And the funniest place to set that would be like a fake heaven, right? Where people have died, and already been judged for whether they were good people or not,” he said.
“So, I try to work that way. I try to think about what’s an interesting thing to talk about or a set of themes or ideas. And then…where [the characters] should live or where they should work or whatever will happen naturally. So far, that hasn’t steered me wrong.”
Schur, who worked with Danson on “The Good Place,” said that the “Cheers” star was his first and only choice to play Charles in “A Man On the Inside, to the point where, if Danson hadn’t been available, “I think we probably wouldn’t have done [the show].”
The prolific TV creator said he’s aware of how people in their “golden years” are underrepresented in pop culture, but he wasn’t specifically thinking about that when making the show.
“I think anyone can sniff out a pander. And I think that Hollywood has a pretty bad habit of pandering to different underrepresented groups of people, whether it be ethnically underrepresented or gender underrepresented or anything,” Schur explained.
“And so, what I cared about more than just, ‘ooh, this is a group of people who doesn’t have a lot of programing made for them,’ was ‘this is a group of people for whom there are a lot of really interesting stories.’”
He continued, “And if we can tell the right stories and present them in an authentic and real way, it’s going to really resonate with people not only of that age, but of their kids who were my age and their grandkids, who are my kids’ age.’”
Schur said the show isn’t aiming to downplay the hardships of aging, but rather, to explore, “What are the real concerns and problems and issues and also joys and happiness and delights of being in your mid to late 70s.”