Ted Danson stars as a retired widow who goes undercover to solve a crime at a retirement home A man within.

Colleen E. Hayes/Netflix

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Colleen E. Hayes/Netflix

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

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

A man within revolves around a retired widow, played by Ted Danson, who goes undercover to solve a crime in a retirement community. The series is inspired by the 2020 Chilean documentary called The mole cop.

“One of the things that was remarkable about the documentary for me is that everyone I know who saw it had the exact same feeling, which was, ‘I need to call my mom,’ or ‘I need to call my grandpa,’ or ‘I should do more with my children have to cope,” says Schur. “And it is a rare work of art, I think, that can make everyone feel so warm and positive. So my old producing partner Morgan Sackett said, ‘We should remake that and have Ted (Danson) play the lead role.’ ‘ and as soon as he said it, I just knew he was right and that there was a really good, slightly fictionalized show that could hopefully give people the 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 right place. With all those hits that is clear 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

About 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 said, “Okay, everyone get in line.” And I immediately walked over and stood right in front of her. And the other kids were still running around and being silly and laughing and playing with square balls and stuff. And I remember thinking, what are they doing? This is insane. Like the teacher just said, get in line and they don’t line up. …

My first job was at Saturday evening live. Saturday evening live is one big, messy swirl of madness. Like it’s a big, 90-minute live variety show, where part of the fun is people making mistakes and coloring outside the lines. … That was actually really good for me to be in a place early in my career where it was, this is not rigid. This world isn’t so much about following rules.

About getting the idea for The right placein which moral philosophy is examined

I was playing this game while driving around LA in traffic, where someone cut me off on the freeway or we were in traffic and someone pulled onto the shoulder and sped past me and cut the line, and as a way of trying to to put an end to what you would call road rage, I would play a game in my head where I would say, “That guy just lost ten points.” I imagined a scenario in which there was some kind of omniscient observer of human behavior. And I satisfied my own anger or displeasure toward other people by imagining that it was costing them in some cosmic way.

And so after that Parks and recreation ended and Brooklyn Nine-Nine was in use…NBC very nicely said, you can do whatever you want and we’ll give you at least one season on the air. So I had been thinking about the game I was playing in my head, about other people and about myself and judging my own behavior and doing things that I knew might be a little questionable, and how many points I lost or how many points I got when I did that. certain things. And so that became the idea that I just liked most of the ideas that I had. And I just went after that and thought, okay, 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 will work. I just rolled the dice and I’m glad I did because the experience of working on it was great.

About developing the concept for Parks and recreation

I grew up in a pretty sleepy suburban town in the Northeast. And the government was great. I loved the government. The way the government filled the pool and public park where I swam and hosted Little League. And you know, my public school was great and my teachers were great. And I grew up not understanding this strange demonization of government. …I’m older now and I understand that the government has a lot of problems, but I just never understood why it looked like this demonized power in America. And so I thought something like… in the same way as (The office‘s) Dunder Mifflin was a fictional private sector company, we could essentially create a completely fictional town and talk about it through the public sector world and show what I’ve always believed, which is as if the government was just a bunch of people in the office trying to do something about that will make the city better.

On Parks and recreation reflects the Obama years

I think that show is a great time and place. There are people who use revisionist history to claim that it was always hopelessly naive or something like that. But that was the mood in the country at the time we made that show… It wasn’t wide-eyed optimism, it was cautious optimism. As Leslie Knope was extremely optimistic about the possibility of improving people’s lives. But she was also constantly confronted with the impossibility of this because people are grumpy. They didn’t want her to do what she did. They threw obstacles in her way. … We didn’t pretend that everything was rosy and wonderful. What we were trying to say was: it’s a better way to go through life, to be hopeful and optimistic than to be pessimistic.

About making fun of NPR Parks and recreation

Leslie has been to the local NPR station a few times over the years, and it was just our chance to make little jokes about the reality of listening to NPR. …But it was always fun making NPR jokes. It was always a favorite exercise. We had to stop ourselves from making her go on too much, because if we could have done it in every episode and had enough to make fun of – lovingly.

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

The biggest change is of course just the shift to the streaming model. You know, The officeWe did 28 episodes a year, I think, or maybe 30. The typical season was 22 episodes or 24 episodes. And now a TV season normally lasts eight half hours, or maybe ten. And that completely changes the way you tell stories, right? The advantage TV always had over movies was that you could successfully see a series of characters change and grow live over the course of many, many, many years.

For example, people are still watching Friends because… you see how people go from their mid-twenties to their mid-thirties and have relationships, and those relationships get complicated and convoluted and end. … During COVID, people were revisiting old shows with like 200 episodes Friends and Cheers and whatever. And you could watch an episode every night for five or six months during COVID. And that was incredibly valuable and I think brought people a lot of comfort. And that’s what we lose. And that’s what I mourn most about the new system: we’re actually losing 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.