Entertainment trends run at a breakneck pace in the streaming era, every show or movie or limited series trying to capture the attention of any demographic hungry for more, more, more. It’s not often that a new series gives the old folks a chance, but that’s exactly what The Good Place producer Michael Schur and star Ted Danson have done with Netflix’s new crime comedy A Man on the Inside, a show that suggests, without being cloying, that age doesn’t mean you can’t still get up to a little mischief.
Charles Nieuwendyk (Danson), widower, elderly father, and spy-novel connoisseur, spends his days the way most single retirees do—that is, not doing all that much. The mundanity of his life is shattered when he answers a classified ad posted by a private investigator and gets hired on the spot. His mission, should he choose to accept it, is to infiltrate a local assisted-living facility by posing as a new resident, and sniff out the thief who has stolen a woman’s valuable necklace.
The show itself is based on the 2020 Oscar-nominated Chilean documentary The Mole Agent, in which an elderly man named Sergio goes undercover inside a nursing home to investigate whether or not one of its inhabitants was suffering from elder abuse.
While inside, he’s exposed to the particular chaos that old-folks’ homes tend to run on: One resident falls in love with him, and he uncovers evidence of another’s kleptomania after people’s belongings start going missing. Apparently, Schur’s producing partner Morgan Sackett sent him the idea to adapt the film and a suggestion to cast Danson as the lead in the same email, and, having seen the show, it’s difficult to imagine it any other way.
The half-hour episodes spin by with that breezy Schur sheen and clever sweetness. Danson, in expensive-looking tweed jackets and silk pocket squares (which the short title sequence borrows as a motif), spends most of every episode looming over his “fellow” residents as his employer, private detective Julie (Lilah Richcreek Estrada), poses as his daughter so she can come in and out of the home without arousing suspicion, setting little traps for the invisible thief. (Charles’ actual daughter Emily, played by Santa Clarita Diet‘s Mary Elizabeth Ellis, pretends to be his niece.)
Charles would fancy himself particularly suited for the high-octane environment of spycraft, given his love of John le Carré books and puzzle solving, but it takes him a few episodes to find his groove. “I need a project to focus on or I just feel like I’m floating,” he candidly explains. As he grows closer to the other residents and starts sniffing out clues on his own, he gradually puts the pieces together. And like The Mole Agent’s Sergio, he also proves irresistible to the female residents (I mean, it’s Ted Danson, after all).
Because this is a show about the elderly, it’s clear-eyed about the fact that the characters we’re following episode to episode are nearing the end of their lives. Presented to us with a spoonful of light comedy, the reality is a little easier to swallow, but it doesn’t completely go away. The fictional care home has a wing for those suffering from dementia, the ever-present possibility of which hangs over Charles and his new friends like a cloud. But it’s not enough to stop them from finding joy in what time they have left.
Like The Good Place took the inevitability of death and found not only humor, but also hope in that cruel reality, so does A Man on the Inside look at old age with a twinkle in its eye. The show manages to keep its keen, funny edge while expressing an often moving openness to certain sentiments and fears, not only of growing old, but of becoming useless, of living out your final years or decades without purpose, while—worst-case scenario—your mind slowly fades. The residents of A Man on the Inside, each as charming as the last (even the surly ones), prove to themselves and one another that there’s still plenty of time to craft a spy caper of their own.
