How to solve a crime in a nursing home? Get “The Man Inside”

While preparing for his new comedy series on Netflix, The man inside TV producer Michael Schur visited a number of nursing homes throughout California. He expected it to be a sad place, but what he found surprised him.

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

The man inside The focus is on a widowed pensioner, played by Ted Dansonwho goes undercover to solve a crime in a retirement community. The series was inspired by a 2020 Chilean documentary called Agent Mole.

“What was remarkable to me about this documentary, among other things, was that everyone I know who watched it had the same feeling: “I need to call my mom,” or “I need to call my grandfather.” “, or “I need to call my grandfather.” I should hang out with my kids more,” Schur says. “And I think it’s a rare piece of art that can give everyone such a warm and positive feeling. So my longtime producing partner Morgan Sackett said, “We should redo this and let Ted (Danson) star.” ‘ and as soon as he said that, I just knew he was right and that there was a very good, slightly fictional show out there that could hopefully give people that same feeling.”

Schur’s previous television work includes script writing. For Office, co-creation and writing for Parks and Recreation And Brooklyn Nine-Nine in addition to creating and writing for Nice place. With all these hits it’s clear that Schur could have retired himself, but he says he enjoys what he does too much to stop.

“Why shouldn’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 did it. It’s a miracle. This is incredible. And I do it because I love it.”

Interview Highlights

On how comedy helped him follow the rules less

I have a very specific memory of being in kindergarten and on the playground… and the teacher came out and said, “Okay, everyone lined up.” And I immediately walked up and stood right in front of her. And the other kids were still hanging around, messing around, laughing, playing with square balls and everything. And I remember thinking, “What are they doing?” This is crazy. As the teacher just said: line up and they don’t line up. …

My first job was in Saturday Night Live. Saturday Night Live it’s a big, chaotic maelstrom of madness. It’s like it’s a big rambling 90-minute live variety show where part of the fun is seeing people make mistakes and color outside the lines. … It was actually really good for me to be in a place early in my career where things weren’t tough. This world is not so much about following rules.

Coming to an idea Nice placewhich explores moral philosophy

I used to play this game when I was driving in traffic in Los Angeles and someone would cut me off on the freeway, or we would be in traffic and someone would pull over on the side of the road and pass me and cut the line, and as a way While trying to stop what you would call road rage, I mentally played a game where I said, “This guy just lost 10 points.” I imagined a scenario in which there was some kind of omniscient observer of human behavior. And I satisfied my own anger or dissatisfaction with other people by imagining that it cost them some cosmic price.

And so after Parks and Recreation ended and Brooklyn Nine-Nine was up and running… NBC very kindly said, you can do whatever you want and we’ll give you at least one season on the air. So I was thinking about this game I was playing, about other people and about myself, evaluating my behavior and doing things that I knew were a little questionable and how many points did I lose or how many points did I gain when I did it . certain things. And so the idea came about that I just liked most of the ideas that I had. And I just got into it and thought, okay, this is 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 it because the experience of working on it was wonderful.

About concept development Parks and Recreation

I grew up in a fairly quiet suburban town in the Northeast. And the government seemed to be excellent. I loved the government. It was as if the government was the one that filled the pool and public park where I swam and started 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’ve gotten older and I understand that the government has a lot of problems, but I just never understood why there is such a demonized force in America. And so I kind of thought… just like (Officex) Dunder Mifflin was a fictional private company, we could essentially create a completely fictional town and talk about it through the world of the public sector and just show what I’ve always believed, which is that government is just a bunch of people in the office who will try to do something that will make the city a better place.

On Parks and Recreation reflecting the Obama years

I think this show is very much true to its time and place. There are people who use revisionist history to argue that it was always hopelessly naive or something like that. But that was the mood of the country at the time we did the show… It wasn’t naive optimism, it was cautious optimism. Like Leslie Knope, he was extremely optimistic about the possibility of making people’s lives better. But she also constantly faced the impossibility of this, because people are grumpy. They didn’t want her to do what she did. They put obstacles in her way. … We didn’t pretend that everything was rosy and great. We were trying to say that a better way to live life is to be hopeful and optimistic than to be pessimistic.

On NPR’s ridicule Parks and Recreation

Leslie has appeared on the local NPR station a few times over the years, and this was just our chance to, like, joke about the reality of listening to NPR. … But it was always fun to joke about NPR. This has always been a favorite exercise. We had to kind of hold back from having her talk too much because if only we could do that in every episode and have a lot of things to laugh about – love it.

On how the shift from the web to streaming has changed television writing

The biggest change is obviously the move to a streaming model. You know, OfficeI think we did 28 episodes a year, maybe 30. A typical season was 22 or 24 episodes. And now a television season is usually eight half-hours long, maybe 10. And that completely changes the way you tell stories, right? The advantage of television over film has always been that you can successfully watch a cast of characters in real life change and grow over many, many, many years.

Like, people are still watching Friends because… you watch people go from their 20s to their 30s and they have relationships and those relationships get messy and complicated and end. … During COVID, people were re-watching old series that had 200 episodes, e.g. Friendsand Your health 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 a lot of comfort to people. And that’s what we’re losing. And that’s what I regret most about the new system is that we’re just losing what I thought was the inherent advantage of television storytelling over film or anything else.

Lauren Krenzel and Susan Nyakundi produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Bridget Benz, Molly Seavey-Nesper and Beth Novy adapted it for the web.