If Michael Schur has a trademark: it is deep kindness. A decade and a half ago, he transformed Parks and Recreation from a bland Office clone into a classic, simply by making the characters more optimistic. Next came The Good Place, a show about reaching heaven through self-improvement. He then wrote a book called How to Be Perfect. The man knows his business.

So when it was announced that Schur’s latest project would be a Netflix series called A Man on the Inside, kindness was always going to be a key factor. However, the level he reaches here is unprecedented, even by his standards. In this show, Schur plants a flag as the Sir Edmund Hillary of Nice.

A Man on the Inside is the story of Charles (Ted Danson), a lonely, retired widower who takes a job as a private investigator and infiltrates a retirement home to discover the identity of a thief. Only, as you may have guessed, the job gives him purpose and the residents give him company, and everything is beautiful, sweet, and heartwarming. The series is based on the Oscar-nominated documentary The Mole Agent because this all happened in real life.

The problem is that The Mole Agent is already great. That raises the same question raised by Taika Waititi’s film Next Goal Wins, also based on a superlative documentary. What’s the point of making it anyway?

Let’s approach this like a detective. The key to greenlighting A Man on the Inside, one suspects, is that it allows Schur and Danson to work together again. After all, The Good Place revitalized Danson’s career, allowing him to play nice and clean, which he does again here. Perhaps other actors would have been tempted to lean more into the character’s advancing years and play Charles as unreliable and incompetent. Danson, meanwhile, still has the energy of a man half his age. His timing and spark are as precise as ever and he practically crosses the episodes. It’s as good a vehicle as he’s ever had.

Another point could be that when Schur sets a series in a retirement home, he gets to fill out his cast with some of the greatest character actors of the past 50 years. There’s Stephen McKinley Henderson, who’s been in everything from Lincoln to Ladybird. There’s John Getz, from The Fly and Born on the Fourth of July and a million other things. There’s Lori Tan Chinn, from Orange is the New Black and Awkwafina is Nora from Queens. And Clyde Kusatsu, who you’ll no doubt recognize from one of his 317 acting credits. Sally Struthers is in this. Susan Ruttan stars in this. These artists are all severely underserved by the entertainment industry. The fact that they are now spending their time in the sun – and in a show about older people who still have a lot to offer – is a big plus.

The more difficult question is whether or not A Man on the Inside succeeds. If you’re coming as a fan of Schur’s previous work, maybe not. This is not a belly laugh show. Instead, it’s mildly humorous, like Bill Lawrence’s Apple TV+ shows. It’s charming and sweet, and full of characters who appear to be multi-millionaires with impeccable taste in home furnishings. It’s funny, but your neighbors won’t laugh.

But stripped of these expectations, there is a tenderness here that will sneak up on you and silently destroy you if you’re not careful. The common thread that runs through the series is dementia. When it chooses to play that card completely, which happens more and more often as the series progresses, A Man on the Inside becomes a total howler. If nothing else, it definitely affected me.

Who knows where A Man on the Inside goes from here. There is certainly the expectation of renewal – the final scene makes that clear – but there doesn’t seem to be much progress. By the end, the mystery is solved, Charles has regained his connection to the world, and (most importantly) the source material has been exhausted. Schur, however, is the master of season two reinvention, having turned both The Good Place and Parks and Recreation on their heads after their initial outings. A Man on the Inside has so much promise that we can hope he can repeat the trick again.