Ed Note: Actually it’s titled “A Man on the Inside” — a series of 8 episodes. Corny, poignant, funny and an evolving heartfelt story. Basically FUN!
From Rolling Stone
Mike Schur’s The Good Place was a cosmic epic about what happens when the universe is fundamentally broken. But it was also a four-season discussion of the best way to live a good life — for both yourself and the world around you. It just brilliantly inserted these questions of philosophy and ethics into a candy-coated shell of jokes about telemarketing scams and Florida Men.
Schur’s new series, the Netflix comedy A Man on the Inside, reunites him with Good Place co-star Ted Danson, and approaches many of the same ideas in a very different, but still hugely appealing way.
The setting this time isn’t the afterlife, but it’s close: a San Francisco retirement community whose occupants are keenly aware that they don’t have many more trips around the sun to enjoy. Danson plays Charles, a retired college professor who still hasn’t gotten over the death of his wife, and has retreated into a hermit’s existence where he rarely interacts with other people, outside of clipping and mailing random newspaper articles to his daughter Emily (Mary Elizabeth Ellis). When Emily urges him to get back into the world in some way, he comes across an ad from Julie (Lilah Richcreek Estrada), a private investigator looking into a jewel robbery at the Pacific View Retirement Residence, who’s been hired by the victim’s wealthy son (Schur regular Marc Evan Jackson). With no obvious means of access to the facility on her own, Julie decides to send a senior citizen in there to pose as a new resident and get to the bottom of this. The job gives Charles a temporary purpose, as well as an excuse to clumsily act out various vintage spy movie fantasies. (continued on Page 2)