Mike Schur Sends Ted Danson on Undercover Mission in “A Man on the Inside"

A Man On The Inside started as a 2020 documentary film by Maite Alberdi called The Mole Agent. It was an exposé of elder citizens’ abuses in nursing homes. Now a comedy television series starring Ted Danson as Charles, the amateur sleuth, his daughter Emily (Mary Elizabeth Ellis) seeking connection after the death of her mother Victoria, and Julie Kovalenko (Lilah Richcreek Estrada) Charles’ fake daughter and a private investigator who hires him to solve the case of the missing jewels at Pacific View Retirement Community.

Mike Schur (The Office, Brooklyn Nine-Nine, The Good Place) spoke to us about navigating the film to series adaptation.

“I wanted to keep the way the documentary made you feel. It made me want to call my dad or my grandmother. There is an inherent warmth to it that I really connected with,” reflects Schur.

Schur adopted a ‘Michaelangelo’ approach to his TV show and chipped away at anything that wasn’t David; or in this case, removing the documentary components, but retaining its “tone and vibe.”

However, there were differences in the story construction in the TV series. The writers added the character of his daughter Emily in the show and stripped back the private investigator character to allow Julie to become a surrogate.

The Character Triad – A Man With Two Daughters

This triad of characters forms the basis of the show. Charles grapples with relating to both daughters who challenge him to find meaning and purpose in his life unmoored following his wife’s passing in different ways.

The writers divided the eight episodes in the series into three sections. “I felt very strongly that the first episode needed to be all backstory filling in the gaps of who this guy is, where is he emotionally, and where is he mentally, before he does the bold thing of taking the job,” states Schur.

“The end of part one was going to be those three characters colliding head on.” Charles is hired as a private investigator by Julie and Emily only  finds out about the case when she comes to visit him.

“Emily wants to have an emotional relationship with him, which given that he’s a retired scientist, engineer, and a professor, he was never really comfortable expressing himself emotionally.”

Charles expresses his love for Emily by sending her letters and newspaper clippings.

“His love language is anecdotes he’s learned from the New Yorker and her love language is actual human love.” Emily feels that getting Charles to open up and talk about her mom and his wife is like getting blood from a stone.

Charles wants Emily to know that he loves her, but he’s incapable of saying so. Schur refers to various scenes where her mom would tell her she loves her, but her father could only say that he’s proud of her. There’s a gap in Emily’s emotional needs, now that the “I love you” parent is gone.

Julie has no interest in this. “She is all business. She likes to solve puzzles. She indulges the side of Charles that least needs to be indulged, which is that he also likes to solve puzzles. He connects with her at that level and she demands nothing of him other than to solve this puzzle for her.” They bond in a relatively disconnected way.

Consequently, Charles prefers spending time with Julie rather than Emily, resulting in conflict. There’s an argument in the season and Charlie asks why his real daughter doesn’t get his dilemma when his fake daughter does.

Schur describes the relationship dynamic between Emily, Victoria, and Charles as juggling three balls and continuing after removing one. “When a family suffers a loss, it isn’t just the absence of that person that causes a problem, it’s that the entire way that the organism intersected and functions is fundamentally changed. If you’re not attentive to that, you end up just becoming disparate parts of a new system that are not intersecting and not moving in sync with each other.”

The Insidious Effect Of Loneliness

There’s a deeper underlying theme in A Man On The Inside than emotional neglect and familial bonding.

“Didi (Stephanie Beatriz) who runs the retirement home, says to Charles that the biggest threat to seniors isn’t an accident or a health problem, it’s loneliness.” The emotional harm can be greater than physical harm, especially in old age when their social circles dwindle.

Charles often drifts through life without frequent human interaction. Emily and Julie teach him that “there is great value  in just being around other people, talking to them, learning about their lives, being annoyed by them, before coming to love them. Those things are crucial and fundamental to the human experience. Without them, you might think you’re okay, but generally speaking, you’re not as okay as you could be.”

Solving The Crime

The storylines of A Man On The Inside are told along two tracks – character and detective. Mike Schur uses index cards to keep track of each.

“I like being able to write something and then move it around like Lego. I move the cards around as discrete chunks of story based on what should happen first. But I also write messages that I want to remember for the writers’ room.”

Most of the writers on the show are comedy writers, so they got very excited about writing a mystery with all the twists and turns as the case unfolds. Schur adds that when they pitched too many twists, the show strayed.

“There still needs to be enough of  a mystery to feel satisfied at the end of this season. Charles is going to solve the case. There will have been clues, red herrings, suspects, alibis and all of the building blocks of mystery stories, but the point of the show is not the mystery,” continues Mike.

In order to highlight the true value of Charles’ emotional journey, Schur decided to solve the mystery in the cold open of the final episode. “I decided that we were going to stop the new laying in of clues a little more than halfway. It was not a crime of malice. It was a woman who was having memory problems.”

Charles spends most time in episodes four and five gathering clues. “We worked out a bunch of clues, suspects, and little moments, and we scattered them through the first five episodes and then we put it away. It still feels like the mystery is present all the way through the season, but it’s really only the first half of the season.”

In the final third of the season, there is more emphasis on Charles’ improved relationship with his daughter and his new friend Calbert (Stephen McKinley Henderson). Audiences also find out more about Didi’s life.

"The series will be judged on the emotional components and not whether the mystery was totally satisfying."

Finding The Comedy

A Man On The Inside draws much of its humor from The Mole Agent documentary where 83 year old Sergio takes on a job he’s entirely unqualified for; much like Charles. “He answers a classified ad and becomes an undercover private detective’s assistant in an old age home.”

“I can picture him trying to use a top secret set of recording glasses and making voice memos, taking surreptitious pictures and not having any idea how to do it right,” notes Schur.

“Writing successful television shows is more about developing good characters, making them three dimensional, giving them distinct personalities, and having them bump into each other in various fun ways.”

“Resident Elliott (John Getz) is a grouchy, slightly Republican guy who hates everyone and everything and smokes cigars. He is kind of rude and marches through life thinking that everybody owes him something. He’s deeply in love with Virginia (Sally Struthers) who does not fall for any of his tricks. He will do just about anything to make her love him again even though it causes an incredible amount of embarrassment and pain. You smash those two people together and you get comedy out of it.”

“There’s also a character named Grant (Clyde Kusatsu) who is a super pompous Princeton graduate. We dropped him into every episode once or twice and had him say something absurd.”

“There’s a woman called Beverly (Veronica Cartwright) who’s hitting on him and says, ‘I guess there really is someone for everyone.’ Grant totally misses it responds, ‘I think the roquefort [cheese] is a triumph!'” Then there’s the surly Susan (Lori Tan Chinn), president of the residents’ council who loves to complain and make safety demands.