A Man on the Inside series creator Mike Schur opened up about the inspiration behind his newest Ted Danson-led comedy series, which is now available for streaming on Netflix. Since its debut last week, the show currently holds a near-perfect Tomatometer score on Rotten Tomatoes.
A Man on the Inside creator on recapturing the magic of The Mole Agent
During a recent interview with ComingSoon, Schur shared what it was like trying to recapture the magic of The Mole Agent, the Oscar-nominated documentary that served as the inspiration behind Netflix’s A Man on the Inside series. He revealed that it was important for the creative team to include the serious topics tackled from the documentary into the new show in order to stay faithful to the core of the source material.
“The documentary was very special, I think. Because it’s broadly comic idea, and then as it goes along, it starts to really get serious and in-depth about a lot of really serious things about aging, memory loss, death, and a lot of the practical realities of being in your seventies, eighties, and nineties,” Schur said.
“I thought, ‘Wow, the real trick here would be to make a series that gives you all of the same feelings.’ That was always our North Star; that’s how we navigated in the writer’s room. We want people to feel the same way when they watch the show that they felt when they watched the documentary. So that meant not shying away from that stuff. We’re gonna run right at it. We’re gonna do stories about memory loss and even death and tricky relationships and what it means to get older. I think it wouldn’t have been a faithful adaptation of the documentary if we hadn’t run right at all of those really serious subjects, even while trying to be funny.”
A Man on the Inside also stars Mary Elizabeth Ellis, Stephanie Beatriz, Lilah Richcreek Estrada, Stephen McKinley Henderson, Sally Struthers, Margaret Avery, John Getz, Susan Ruttan, Lori Tan Chinn, Clyde Kusatsu, Marc Evan Jackson, Jama Williamson, Wyatt Yang, Deuce Basco, Lincoln Lambert, Kerry O’Malley. It is executive produced by Schur, Morgan Sackett, David Miner, Maite Alberdi, Marcela Santibañez, Julie Goldman, and Christopher Clements.
“Retired professor Charles feels life has nothing new in store for him. A year after his wife’s passing, he’s become stuck in his routine and grown distant from his daughter Emily. But when he spies a classified ad from private investigator Julie, he’s inspired to roll the dice on a new adventure. Charles’ mission: to go undercover inside the Pacific View Retirement Home in San Francisco and solve the mystery of a stolen family heirloom,” says the synopsis.
