In ‘A Man on the Inside,’ Michael Schur solves a crime in a retirement community : NPR

While researching for his new Netflix comedy series, A Man on the Inside, TV producer Michael Schur visited a string of retirement communities throughout California. He expected them to be sad places, but what he found surprised him.

These were “flourishing communities of people who were very happy to be with each other and to be part of a community,” Schur says. “They were places of happiness and joy, largely.”

A Man on the Inside centers on a widowed retiree, played by Ted Danson, who goes undercover to solve a crime in a retirement community. The series was inspired by the 2020 Chilean documentary called The Mole Agent.

“What was remarkable to me about the documentary, among other things, is that everyone I know who saw it had the same exact feeling, which was ‘I should call my mom,’ or ‘I need to call my grandpa,’ or ‘I should hang out with my kids more,'” Schur says. “And it’s a rare piece of art, I think, that can cause everyone to have such a warm and positive feeling. So my longtime producing partner Morgan Sackett said, ‘We should remake that and have Ted [Danson] play the main part,’ and as soon as he said it, I just knew he was right and that there was a very good, slightly fictionalized show that could hopefully give people that same feeling.”

Schur’s previous TV credits include writing for The Office, co-creating and writing for Parks and Recreation and Brooklyn Nine-Nine in addition to creating and writing for The Good Place. With all those hits, it’s clear that Schur could retire himself, but he says he enjoys what he does too much to stop.
 
“Why wouldn’t I work? It’s sitting in a room with a dozen really funny people writing stories and making jokes,” he says. “I can’t believe I get to do this. It’s a miracle. It’s incredible. And I do it because I love it.”
 

Interview highlights

On how comedy helped him be less of a rule-follower

I have a very specific memory of being in kindergarten and being on the playground … and the teacher came out and went like, “OK, everybody line up.” And I immediately walked over and stood right in front of her. And the other kids were like still milling around and goofing around and laughing and playing with foursquare balls and stuff. And I remember thinking, like, What are they doing? This is insane. Like the teacher just said, line up and they’re not lining up. …

My first job was at Saturday Night Live. Saturday Night Live is a big, messy swirl of craziness. Like it’s a big rambling, 90-minute-long live variety show where part of the fun is that people are making mistakes and coloring outside the lines. … That was actually really good for me to be in a place at the beginning of my career where it was like, this is not rigid. This world is not about following rules so much.

On getting the idea for The Good Place, which explores moral philosophy

I used to play this game as I drove around in traffic in L.A. where someone would cut me off on the freeway or we would be in traffic and someone would pull onto the shoulder and speed past me and cut the line, and as a way of trying to stem off what you would call road rage, I would play a game in my head where I would say, “That guy just lost 10 points.” I was imagining a scenario in which there was some kind of omniscient observer of human behavior. And I satisfied my own anger or displeasure with other people by imagining that that cost them in some cosmic way.

And so after Parks and Recreation ended and Brooklyn Nine-Nine was up and running … NBC very kindly said, you can sort of do whatever you want and we’ll give you at least one season on the air. So I had been thinking about that game I played in my head, about other people and about myself and judging my own behavior and doing things that I knew were maybe slightly iffy and how many points I lost or how many points I gained when I did certain things. And so that became the idea that I just liked the most of the ideas that I had. And I just pursued that and thought, alright, it’s going to be weird. I’m going to do a half-hour comedy show about moral philosophy. But I don’t know, maybe it’ll work. I just sort of rolled the dice and I’m glad I did because the experience of working on it was wonderful.

On developing the concept for Parks and Recreation

I grew up in a pretty sleepy suburban town in the Northeast. And like, the government was great. I loved the government. Like the government was what filled the swimming pool and the public park that I swam in and organized the Little League. And, you know, my public school was great and my teachers were great. And I grew up kind of not understanding this weird demonization of the government. … I’m older now, and I understand that the government has a lot of problems, but I just never understood why it was like this demonized force in America. And so I kind of thought like … in the same way that [The Office‘s] Dunder Mifflin was a fictional private sector company, we could essentially create an entirely fictional town and talk about it through the world of the public sector and just show what I have always believed, which is like the government is just a bunch of people in an office who try to do stuff to that will make the town better.

On Parks and Recreation reflecting the Obama years

I think that that show is very much of a time and place. There are people who use revisionist history to claim that it was always hopelessly naïve or something. But that is what the mood of the country at the time we were making that show … It wasn’t wide-eyed optimism, it was careful optimism. Like Leslie Knope was extremely optimistic about the possibility of making people’s lives better. But she was also constantly confronted with the impossibility of that because people are grouchy. They didn’t want her to do whatever she was doing. They were throwing obstacles in her way. … We weren’t pretending that everything was rosy and great. What we were trying to say was, it’s a better way to go through life, to be hopeful and optimistic than it is to be pessimistic.

On making fun of NPR on Parks and Recreation

There were a number of times that Leslie went on the local NPR station over the years, and it was just our chance to, like, make the little jokes about the reality of listening to NPR. … But it was always fun to do NPR jokes. It was always a favorite exercise. We had to kind of stop ourselves from having her go on too much, because if we could have done it in every episode and had plenty to make fun of — lovingly.

On how the shift from network to streaming has changed TV writing

The biggest change, obviously, is just the shift to the streaming model. You know, The Office, we did 28 episodes one year, I think, or maybe 30. The typical season was 22 episodes or 24 episodes. And now a season of TV is eight half hours usually, or maybe 10. And that just completely changes the way you tell stories, right? The advantage TV always had over movies was you could, in success, watch a set of characters live and change and grow over many, many, many years.

Like, people still watch Friends because … you’re watching people go from their mid-20s to their mid-30s and they have relationships and those relationships get tangled and complicated and end. … During COVID people revisited old shows that had 200 episodes like Friends and Cheers and whatever. And you could sit during COVID and watch an episode every night for five or six months. And that was incredibly valuable and I think brought people a lot of comfort. And that’s what we’re losing. And that’s what I mourn the most about the new system is we’re just sort of losing what, to my mind, was the inherent advantage that TV storytelling had over movies or anything else.

Lauren Krenzel and Susan Nyakundi produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Beth Novey adapted it for the web.