In Maite Alberdi’s documentary The mole copan elderly Chilean man goes undercover at a nursing home to investigate allegations that one of the residents is being abused and abused. In A man withinthe new Netflix series based – very loosely – on Alberdi’s film, the stakes are lowered considerably. Instead of elder abuse, Charles Nieuwendyk (Ted Danson), a retired engineering professor and recent widower, is brought in to track down the person behind the disappearance of a ruby ​​necklace that may not have been worth that much in the first place. As in the other worlds created by Michael Schur, no one here is cruel or mean-spirited in any particularly pernicious way—not even The right place‘s demons looked more like cheerful pranksters than the embodiment of evil. Tempers occasionally flare and there are many misunderstandings, but for the most part everyone does their best, and that is rarely enough.

When he is first hired by a private investigator looking for an accomplice, The mole cop‘Sergio, who is in his eighties, struggles with the simplest of tasks: just mastering a smartphone’s photo app is a challenge, forgetting how to successfully place a FaceTime call. Charles is a little more tech savvy, but while he knows his way around an iPhone, he’s completely lost when it comes to subterfuge. Asked by his future employer, Julie (Lilah Richcreek Estrada), to take a surreptitious photo of two strangers, Charles ends up posing for selfies with them, reflecting both his lack of chill and his desire for human connection. A year after his wife’s death, Charles lives alone in his spacious modernist home, reading spy novels and occasionally cutting out a newspaper article to send to his daughter Emily (Mary Elizabeth Ellis), with a scribbled note in the margin : ‘Fascinating! ” She’s only two hours away, but she’s busy raising three teenage boys, plus she and her father were never really close. Her mother, she explains, was the one she could talk to. Dad was the one to go to for the most efficient directions from point A to point B.

Underlying A man within‘s eight half-hour episodes, with names and faces familiar from previous Schur shows, such as Parks and recreation And Brooklyn Nine-Nineis the realization that life is hard enough without introducing the conflicts and threats that usually lead to drama. The greatest threat to an elderly person’s well-being, explains the home’s director, Didi (Stephanie Beatriz), isn’t illness or injury: it’s loneliness, a condition that only makes survival more acute. If Charles is a lousy spy, especially early on, it is partly because he is untrained in the art of subterfuge, but it is also, we come to understand, that his social skills have been in decline for years as he has left the lecture hall exchanged university for a job. quiet crossword at the breakfast table (he does it in ink, of course) and spent months with his grief as his chief companion. He’s supposed to keep a low profile and not draw the attention of the other residents, but when a man who looks like Ted Danson walks into a facility where women outnumber women several times over, it’s an impossibility, and the attention hits him like a narcotic. – well, that and the weed he ends up smoking after his welcome party.

The show evolves gently over the course of the first season, as Charles fends off a crush on another resident (Sally Struthers) and the sputtering hostility of her former boyfriend (John Getz). He makes a friend in Calbert (Stephen McKinley Henderson), who talks about their strained relationships with their children over late-night backgammon, and an ally in Beatriz’s Didi, a boundlessly patient and cheerful administrator who burns off stress by working under her on the to lie down on the ground. desk with noise canceling headphones. The investigation never quite goes away, but as the presence of a callous thief stealing precious heirlooms from the most vulnerable would explode the gently soothing tones of the series, you quickly realize that the mystery won’t be a whodunnit, but an explanation of why the It wasn’t what we thought it was. In the first episode, Didi takes Charles on a tour of the building, and the way he turns down her offer to show him the memory care wing of the building tells you everything you need to know about where the story is actually going.

If streaming shows can suffer from an overreliance on twists, desperate to drive viewers to the next episode button rather than risk any hint of closure, A man within wanders in the opposite direction and uncoils during a leisurely stroll. Without the structure of a network show’s act breaks or the broadcast sitcom’s imperative to always drive to the next laugh line, the series just drifts along amiably, assuming you’d rather dip into the hot bath than risk change the channel and get a chill. (The silliest gags are reserved for the end credits, where several characters are given last names and never spoken on screen, like Chagughlaight-Accourse and Autumnal-Stojakovic.) But once you realize it’s a cozy mystery in sitcom garb , maybe you just enjoy it heat.