(courtesy IMP Awards)
When it comes to sitcom royalty, you would have to consider Michael Schur, who has had a hand in creating and delivering standouts of the genre such as Parks and Recreation, Brooklyn Nine-Nine and The Good Place, as occupying the top of a very hilarious heap.
He has a way of combining heartfelt humanity with a raw, insightful intelligence, brilliantly and fulsomely wrought characters and a sense of gleeful, highly funny absurdity into one deliciously comedic package, with the current prime example of his considerable talent being the delightful The Man on the Inside.
Now in its second season, the show is not one of those aggressive sitcoms that punctuate every scene with a fearsome intensity delivering wisecracks and rapier quips at a rate to turn the head of even the most multitasking of viewers.
Rather what The Man on the Inside does so well is serve up cosy, heartfelt laughs with a heady dose of the ridiculous and the absurd with a healthy dose of the kind of humanity that elevates the very best sitcoms out there.
Given the fact that the central character, a onetime listless widower and retired engineering college lecturer Charles Charles Nieuwendyk (Ted Danson) ———- SPOILER ALERT !!!!! ———- well and truly solved the case in the show’s first season, set in a San Francisco retirement home called Pacific View, the show resets itself in its second outing, though not without bringing along some of the most memorable characters from the first set of episodes such as Charles’ bestie Calbert (Stephen McKinley Henderson) and the home’s administrator Didi (Stephanie Beatrix) making a return appearance.
Their return, along with other residents of the home including bickering couple Virginia (Sally Struthers) and Elliott (John Getz), underscore Schur’s gift for taking an initially narrow but wholly fulfilling premise and seamlessly expanding it to not only offer up a plethora of new narrative paths but to beautifully explore how none of us ever leave our pasts fully behind.
In the case of Charles, who was desperately lonely and bereft of purpose when he took up a gig as an old man at a retirement home investigating the likely theft of a necklace for buttoned-down private investigator, Julia Kovalenko (Lilah Richcreek Estrada), many of the people in the show’s first season are now his highly valued “found family”, people who mean the world to him and who come to play an important, and often amusing role in the second set of eight episodes.
This time around, Charles, who is fiercely intelligent and highly perceptive but who has an endearingly goofy habit of doing quirky things like inventing codenames for participants in a scheme to source vital information at an alumni reunion party when none are really needed, is investigating who is behind the theft of a laptop from a college president, Jack Beringer (Max Greenfield).
With a huge donation in the offing from hilariously narcissistic billionaire, Brad Vinick (Brad Cole), which could save much-loved liberal arts institution, Wheeler College from closure, finding the laptop is paramount.
But, of course, as is often the way in a quirky Schur sitcom, the path to a conclusion is not nearly as straightforward as you might expect.
There are gloriously funny twists and turns all over the place, and as is the way for many a whodunnit, all kinds of red herrings that have you wondering who could have committed the crime and why stopping Vinick, who is venally but amusingly repulsive, matters so much to them.
The solving of the crime is naturally the thing but The Man on the Inside, in keeping with Schur’s sitcoms also finds plenty of time to focus in on its characters.
Charles is, of course, front and centre and his romance with delightfully offbeat Wheeler College music professor Mona Margadoff (real life partner Mary Steenburgen) provides all kinds of moments for heartfelt storylines and rich humour alike, her presence also fuelling some beautiful interactions with Charles’ daughter Emily (Mary Elizabeth Ellis) with whom he is very close.
She gets an expanded role this time, along with devoted husband and college sweetheart Joel Piñero (Eugene Cordero) and their three hilariously disengaged sons, and while you might think expending narrative time on characters not central to the mystery solving plot might prove to be an unnecessary distraction, Schur ensures they matter to the overall storytelling impact of The Man on the Inside.
The show also expands what we know about Charles’ emotionally repressed, workaholic boss Julia, who reunites, rather uneasily at first, with her estranged mother Vanessa (Constance Marie) and whose comedically brilliant and kooky as hell partner Apollo (Jason Mantzoukas) gives the second season of The Man on the Inside some gloriously silly and verbally surreal moments.
Helping on that front too is the provost of Wheeler College, Holly (Jill Talley) who is so tense and anxiety-ridden, and honestly with good cause given what’s going on at the troubled educational institution, that she has a litany of less-than-healthy coping mechanisms such as swallowing nicotine gum whole and drinking, frankly disgusting, Pepto Bismol coffee.
It’s in the seamless way that Schur integrates offbeat characters like Apollo and Holly, and a number of other less out-there characters, that we see how gifted he is in crafting sitcoms that make you laugh, which really is the order of the day if you’re doing it right, but which also really make you feel something.
Neither the well executed sentimentality, which never overstays its welcome, nor the more OTT comedic moments of The Man on the Inside swallow the other whole, ensuring that every joke lands, every raw and vulnerable moment feels affectingly authentic, and you get to the end of the season not only happy to have answers to all kinds of whodunnit questions but happy to have spent time with people who come to matter a great deal to you, as they do Charles.
The Man on the Inside is a gem, a sitcom with gentle verve, feistily offbeat wit and a rich character-driven humanity which ensures that while you laugh, and laugh a lot, you feel a lot too, and leave another season of this wholly excellent sitcom feel very good about the world at a time when the real version is not exactly inspiring a great deal of confidence not warm-and-fuzzy feelings.
The Man on the Inside streams on Netflix.