“A Man on the Inside,” created by Michael Schur and starring Ted Danson, synthesizes the most gutting realities of life and death into a cozy, low-stakes comedy populated by well-intentioned sweethearts. The show is as gentle and mild as baby soap, though it could hardly promise no tears.
Danson stars as Charles, whose wife died a year earlier from complications of Alzheimer’s. He is a retired professor and a San Francisco booster who wrote a book about the Golden Gate Bridge; he has a warm but arm’s-length relationship with his daughter, Emily (Mary Elizabeth Ellis), who encourages him find a project or hobby. So he responds to an ad in a newspaper and finds himself working for a private investigator, going semi-undercover in a Bay Area retirement community.
The show is loosely based on “The Mole Agent,” a Chilean documentary from 2020, though the stakes here have been dialed way down: While the figures in the film were investigating potential abuse in an elder-care facility, here the narrative clothesline is a missing necklace. The only person truly aggrieved by its absence is the necklace owner’s son (Marc Evan Jackson), who icily describes his mother moving back in with him as “suboptimal.”
Under the weakly exasperated guidance of Julie (Lilah Richcreek Estrada), the investigator, Charles moves into Pacific View. Virginia (Sally Struthers), an aggressive flirt, and Florence (Margaret Avery), an energetic poet, take an immediate liking to him, which bothers Virginia’s on-again-off-again lover, Elliott (John Getz), who declares Charles his “sexual rival.”
Calbert (Stephen McKinley Henderson) and Charles develop the rom-com-y friendship that would be doomed by Charles’s duplicity were the show not defined by its characters’ deep wells of forgiveness. Didi (Stephanie Beatriz) is the devoted administrator running the facility, cheery and capable. Mostly, Pacific View is like a resort, with parties and companionship and dignified care. According to Didi, loneliness is as detrimental to seniors as any aspect of aging.
Perhaps it is merciful not to dwell in the self-dissolving agony of dementia, for death to be peaceful, hygienic and offscreen. A subplot about a declining woman named Gladys (Susan Ruttan) is central to the story and handled gracefully — shallowly. Better to discuss a fancy watch that costs $10,000, which the characters do, often, or run up an $800 Uber tab. Elliott, the most ornery and cynical resident, can’t stay mad long, and he encourages Charles to simply become inured to his peers losing themselves.
The only stage of grief is acceptance and more acceptance — which can seem hopelessly naïve but, in the show’s defense, is also the sage, brutal truth. None of that bargaining ever works.
Late in the season, when Charles finally talks to his daughter about how hard it was to care for her mother toward the end, their once strained communication is so healthy that it might lower your cholesterol. In case you’re wondering if these characters are then ready to move on, don’t worry: The scene is set to the Tom Petty song “Time to Move On.”
Schur and Danson worked together previously on “The Good Place,” which had a much clearer, louder voice than “Inside” does, though that show’s charming obsession with goofy character names sneaks its way into this show’s closing credits. (We never hear any of the names said aloud, and you have to click Netflix’s “watch credits” button to encounter them.)
There is, of course, another show in which senior comedy legends team up with a surly, younger brunette to solve crimes involving other famous faces. But “Only Murders in the Building” is more substantial, more ha-ha funny and more biting.
Some moments in “Inside” cut through all the tiptoeing, as when Gladys laments in a flash of clarity, “I miss my old personality.” But in general, potential conflicts are handled with such delicacy that gosh, it’s as if there is no conflict at all.
Emily and her husband, Joel (Eugene Cordero), are raising three teenage boys who are rude and annoying, but their biggest misdeeds are trampoline shenanigans, saying “bro” constantly and being screen addicts. An heiress who volunteers at the facility is ditsy and makes the staff members’ jobs more complicated, but she is genuinely devoted to her work. The parent company’s great offense is an offer to promote Didi, which would give her a higher salary and more power but require her to leave Pacific View for office life.
In what could be a showdown, Calbert tells his too-absent son (Marc Anthony Samuel), “You haven’t been worried about me in a while now, son.” It’s immediately followed by a sincere “and that’s fine!” Everyone is fine, everything is fine, or it will be. Or we’ll die, and that will be fine too, in its way. But all this fineness has a way of feeling nonspecific, like the well-intentioned but evasive pablum from people who are not, in fact, on the inside.
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