A widower, eager to shake up his routine, answers an ad from a private detective to solve a mysterious theft. Posing as a new resident, he goes deep undercover at a senior living community, building heartwarming new friendships and a stronger bond with his daughter along the way.
In keeping with the spirit of The Mole Agent, Schur views A Man on the Inside as an opportunity to examine the frequently ignored topic of aging from a comedic yet heartfelt angle. “This is a multigenerational show, and it is equally important to investigate the inner lives of the people who are my age — because it’s a weird thing, when your parents start to need your help. You’re not used to that,” he said. “The whole basis for the relationship was that you need their help. It struck me as such a good idea to adapt this because we just don’t talk about this stuff. It feels painful, and it’s especially hard to talk about it directly with your parents.”
Ted Danson is breaking out of a rut and finding a renewed sense of purpose in A Man on the Inside. Today, Netflix debuted the trailer for the new comedy series, which hails from The Good Place creator Mike Schur.
Premiering November 21 and based on the Oscar-nominated documentary The Mole Agent, the eight-episode series follows a retired man, Charles (Danson), who gets a new lease on life when he answers an ad placed by a private detective and becomes a mole in a secret investigation of the Pacific View Retirement Residence in San Francisco.
Schur watched the original film — which takes place in Chile and follows an 83-year-old widower named Sergio — after several people recommended it to him, and quickly connected with the story.
“I knew almost nothing about [The Mole Agent], and I just fell for it so hard,” Schur told Netflix. “The hero, Sergio, is so wonderfully wrought, so real, just a lovely human being. It’s a beautiful meditation on aging, a subject we are uniquely terrible in this country at confronting, dealing with, or discussing. It showed the reality of aging for people along a very broad spectrum — some folks who were doing great and some folks who were not — and that really grabbed me.”
Even though Schur was moved by the doc, his first instinct wasn’t to adapt the movie as a series. “It didn’t occur to me right away to fictionalize it or adapt it. Then, Morgan Sackett, who’s my producing partner, suggested we remake [it] and have Ted Danson play the main character,” he recalled. Schur and Danson last worked together on the Emmy-nominated series The Good Place, which wrapped in 2020. “As soon as he said that, it became so clear that there was a way to take that story, swapping in Ted’s unique charisma for Sergio’s unique charisma. As soon as we had that idea, things happened very quickly. I started working on my idea for the adaptation, we pitched it to Ted, and he was in.”
Joining Danson is a pedigree list of stars, including several Schur veterans from Brooklyn Nine-Nine.
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A Man on the Inside |
| Network: NetflixGenre: ComedySeasons: 2Episodes: 16 | |
OverviewA retired professor with a knack for snooping gets a new lease on life when a private investigator recruits him to go undercover and crack a case. |
