(courtesy IMDb)
Ask most people what sitcom should make you do, and you’ll likely to be told it’s to make you laugh.
And while you can’t really argue with that as an outcome – it’s all in the abbreviated of “situation comedy” after all – the really good sitcoms should also make you feel and think and walk away feeling like you’re a little better for having watched them.
Sound too lofty a goal for what’s commonly perceived as a throwaway, escapist genre?
Then think of shows like Cheers, Frasier, Parks & Recreation, The Good Place, to name just four among many, and now, of course, A Man on the Inside, the latest creation from the masterful Mike Schur who has given us, yes, The Good Place and Parks & Recreation (where he was creator and co-creator respectively) and who knows how to generously dole out the laughs while make our hearts feel so much that they might just burst.
In a good way, naturally.
Starring Ted Danson, a Schur alum – he’s not the only returnee from past Schur creations with Marc Evan Jackson and D’Arcy Carden making vibrantly impactful cameos – A Man on the Inside is a beguilingly deceptive show that starts all sunshine and sweetness and cute playfulness before going deep into what it means to be older, how parents and their adult kids can relate when all the certainties are swept away by, say, the death of a parent, and how you keep on going in a role when it seems like the entire (corporate) world is against you and you want to do is some good.
It is, by any measure, an empathetically thoughtful show, but what really makes it shine is how Schur, with the help of sharp, emotionally intimate scripts that balance the laughs and the heart to an exemplary and often quite moving degree, melds these two seemingly disparate elements together into something really quite special.
A Man on the Inside stars Danson as a widower, Charles Nieuwendyk, a retired engineering professor living in the Bay Area, who, a year after his wife’s death from Alzheimer’s disease, is yet to find a way forward that has any real meaning or purpose.
His daughter Emily (Mary Elizabeth Ellis) and he are close after a fashion, but with his wife’s worldly goods packed away under Charles’s mid-century modern and her name rarely mentioned, and Emily some two hours away in Sacramento, there is wedge between them that neither of them quite knows how to remove.
Lovingly urged by Emily to find something useful to fill in his empty days, Charles answers a newspaper ad from a private investigator (P. I.), Julie (Lilah Richcreek Estrada) who has been hired by the child of a resident at Pacific View, a Continuing Care Retirement Community, to locate his mother’s missing gold and ruby necklace.
The ad asks for an older person conversant with technology, or you know, at least someone who knows how to somewhat, sort of, use a mobile phone, to act as a mole in the home and find out who stole the necklace.
That means, of course, becoming a resident of the home, which, thanks to the selfless dedication of managing director, Didi (Stephanie Beatriz) is a place of inclusion, care, and most importantly for Charles who has become very lonely in the year since his wife’s death, companionship.
It’s not perfect, of course, rife with gossip, infighting and some hilariously quirky but fully realised residents – no cardboard cutouts here but then Schur isn’t known for cutting corners with his characterisation – such as besties Virginia and Florence (Sally Struthers and Margaret Avery respectively), Charles’s eventual close friend Calbert (Stephen McKinley Henderson), Susan (Lori Tan Chinn) and sweet, lovely Gladys (Susan Ruttan) with whom Charles forms a wholly affecting and gently moving friendship.
BUT, it is precisely what Charles needs, and while he is haplessly and hilariously trying to be the best spy he can be and fulfill his brief to find the necklace – he keeps getting waylaid by some comical ideas of what it means to be a good spy but so well written and acted is he that Charles never comes across as a buffoon or idiot; rather just a well-meaning nerd with a love of boring facts that is simply excited to do his best – he unexpectedly finds a home at Pacific View, and a renewed sense of purpose who saves him in more ways than one.
What’s really wonderful about A Man on the Inside is that while you are laughing at the the artfully drawn characters and their pitch-perfect dialogue, whether they are being off-the-wall hilarious or poignantly insightful or emotionally honest, you are feeling real empathy for these people who haven’t ceased to want to love and live fully just because they have grown old.
The storylines have real fun with the predicament of having a willing spirit but a betraying body and decaying social webs, but they do so with real heart and thoughtfulness, always mindful that while there is something more than faintly ridiculous about the indignities of all kinds that old age visits upon people, that that they also carries with real emotional costs.
The mystery hums along nicely, even with Charles not really knowing what he’s doing much of the time – but again, he’s not the butt of the joke and as an insightful, highly intelligent man, he does make progress; just not as quickly or smoothly as experience P.I. Julie would like – but it almost plays second fiddle to the great changes it brings about in Charles’s and Emily lives and in the lives of the residents, a number of whom become good friends with a man who is technically lying to them about who he is and why he is living in their home.
Satisfying in just about every respect, from superlative scripts to masterful performances and a deft balance between the serious and the silly, A Man on the Inside is proof positive that yes, a sitcom should make you laugh, and that there’s something terribly wrong if it doesn’t, but it can, and should, make you think and feel so profoundly that after the laughs have wafted off into the comedic sunset, that you’re still thinking about the people, their lives and the host of issues they deal with, and that every last part of it matters, and matters greatly on a very personal and human level that stays with you for a good while after the credits roll.
A Man on the Inside streams on Netflix.