Some might summarize the takeaway from Mike Schur’s new Netflix series “A Man on the Inside” as being, “We’re all gonna die … plus jokes.” Schur begs to differ. “I might say it has a slightly more optimistic outlook,” he proposes. “Something like: ‘We’re all going to die, so live the best life you can as long as you can … plus jokes.’” True to form, the man who co-created Amy Poehler’s ever-optimistic “Parks and Recreation” hero, Leslie Knope, extends his humanistic yet funny winning streak with a newly launched Ted Danson comedy.
A 21-time Emmy nominee and three-time winner, Schur wrote for “Saturday Night Live” and “The Office” before co-creating “Brooklyn Nine-Nine” and serving as showrunner on “The Good Place,” starring Danson. Then, at the insistence of producing partner Morgan Sackett, Schur saw Chilean documentary “The Mole Agent,” about 83-year old Sergio, who goes undercover at a retirement home to catch a thief. Sergio is small and Danson is tall, but Schur saw them as kindred spirits. “Having worked with Ted on ‘The Good Place,’” Schur says, “I knew what kind of parts he likes. After I watched ‘The Mole Agent,’ I just saw the whole thing.”
Speaking by video from his office on the Universal lot, Schur talked about the joys of crafting a senior-centric comedy.
In “A Man on the Inside,” Danson is Charles, a retired professor hired to crack the case of a retirement house serial burglar. How did you approach the “whodunit” aspect of the plot?
This isn’t “Knives Out.” The goal is not to make people gasp in surprised dismay: “Ooh, let’s make it seem like it’s this person but then we reveal it’s actually that person.” At one point I actually wrote “Juicy Drama Is Not the Point” on a card and stuck it on the board. There are chunks of mystery, but this is a comedy about a 76-year-old man broadening his life at a moment when he is kind of shrinking down to a little tiny bubble.
You assembled an ace cast that includes a wonderfully quirky ensemble of septuagenarians who portray the residents of the Pacific View Retirement Residence. That must have been fun.
We made a pretty big bet early on that we could find a lot of very funny and talented and able-bodied actors over the age of 70 to fill out the ensemble. Going back to Coach on “Cheers” or Jerry Stiller [on “Seinfeld”], every great sitcom has had at least one older actor and they’re always funny. Our casting director, Allison Jones, poked around and we saw very good options for every one of those roles.
Including Sally Struthers as the flirtatious Virginia. How was her audition?
Sally blew the doors off the place — she was so funny, so sharp. We accidentally gave her an earlier version of a scene that we’d changed. She said, “Fine, give me two minutes.” She read through it and memorized her lines faster than anyone I’ve ever seen.
Danson’s old enough to blend in with the other senior citizens. Was he game about playing his actual age?
Ted is happy to declare to anyone who will listen that’s he’s 76 about to turn 77. The thing that Ted and I talked about a lot when we planned the show is that aging is what you get if you are lucky. Best case scenario, you get to be 76 years old. It’s way better than the alternative.
Charles is clever and charming but not great at talking about the grief he feels over losing his wife a year earlier. Charles’ daughter Emily, played by Mary Elizabeth Ellis, challenges him to open up. You saw their relationship as central to the show?
When I was trying to figure out how to adapt this 90-minute documentary, the very first thing I thought of was that Charles’ daughter needed to be a big part of the story. I’m roughly her age. Most of my friends are going through what I’m going through: We have parents who are aging and need us in ways they’ve never needed us before, whether that’s financially or emotionally or physically, or whatever, but they don’t want to be a burden. I wanted to represent that.
At the retirement home, everybody’s got problems — memory loss, cancer, loneliness — but these darker moments alternate with sight gags, punchlines and snarky wisecracks in a way that somehow feels cohesive. How did you and your team arrive at the show’s true-to-life tone?
Our staff wrote dozens and dozens of excellent jokes, well constructed, funny, interesting, surprising jokes that we threw in the garbage can because they weren’t right for our show’s particular tone.
Which is …
“The Mole Agent” documentary is powerful because it makes people feel something remarkably similar across any age, ethnicity or gender, and I’d describe that feeling in a very reductive way as, “I’ve got to call my mom.” In our show, we tried to do a similar thing with the tone: Basically, does our show contribute to that feeling of making us want to call our moms?