Mike Schur teases Ted Danson as a spy in his creation “A Man on the Inside” | Entertainment

When creator Mike Schur got down to adapt the 2021 Oscar-nominated documentary The Mole Agent into new comedy TV collection A Man on the Inside, he says he had one guiding mild: “Whatever we changed or however we altered the story, I always wanted the vibe or the feeling of the documentary to be what we were aiming at.”

Not that he instantly noticed the poignant, usually comical documentary — about an aged man named Sergio who will get employed by a personal investigator to work as a mole at a retirement residence suspected of elder abuse — as a TV present. “I just thought it was one of the most brilliant things I'd ever seen,” Schur tells Entertainment Weekly. “It's a very special piece of art, and I did not immediately think about adapting it at all. I just was like, goddamn, that was so good.”

It wasn't till a yr or two later that Schur's longtime producing accomplice Morgan Sackett despatched him a fateful electronic mail. “He and I had talked about it after I watched it, and he just sent me an email out of nowhere that said, ‘Hey, we should make The Mole Agent into a show and cast Ted [Danson, star of Schur's The Good Place] as the lead,'” he recollects, including, “and I wrote back and said, ‘Yes, you're correct. We should do that.'”

“It was a no-brainer idea that I guess proves that I have no brain,” Schur jokes. “Because, the idea, once it was presented to me, it was like, oh, of course we do this. That is a perfect idea.”

Though he concedes the collection “crucially” wanted to be “different from the movie because remaking something and just making it the same is kind of pointless,” A Man on the Inside‘s total plot is kind of the identical — it follows Charles (Danson), a retired man who will get a new lease on life when he solutions an advert from a personal investigator and turns into a mole in a secret investigation in a nursing residence.

However, naturally, a lot wanted to be modified or expanded on to craft an eight-episode collection, and to that finish, Schur was eager to beef up the precise crime Charles is investigating. “I just wanted to make a bigger deal out of the case,” he explains. “I wanted the P.I. to be more involved. I wanted there to be more clues and more cliffhangers and more of a sense that this is a real crime that's being committed and a real thing that demands investigation. And I wanted to show Charles going from a person who was kind of bad at it and was playing dress up with the Sherlock Holmes cap, to all the way to being a person who was potentially capable of actually putting the puzzle pieces together and solving a case.”

Stephanie Beatriz, who beforehand starred in Schur's Brooklyn Nine-Nine, performs Didi, the all-seeing, all-knowing managing director of the Pacific View Retirement Residence. Lilah Richcreek Estrada performs Julie, the San Francisco-based personal investigator who hires Charles to be her mole and pretends to be his daughter to keep up the ruse at the retirement residence.

Mary Elizabeth Ellis performs his precise daughter, Emily, a married mom of three boys who has to regulate when her father makes his shocking late-life profession transfer. Exploring her character and her relationship with Charles extra was the largest “key” change made for the collection, Schur says. (In the documentary, Sergio's daughter is simply proven briefly expressing her concern for his new job.)

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It's additionally the a part of the collection that hits closest to residence for Schur, who's 48, and presently coping with the realities of getting getting old mother and father and in-laws. “I think for people in my generation, there's a really unspoken and sort of unexplored set of issues about what you do with your parents when your parents start to need your help, and how you talk to them, and how you relate to them, and the different place that they sort of assume in your lives,” he explains. “So I thought that the biggest thing we needed to add was the character of his daughter. And we needed to have a real exploration as we went along of how his daughter fits into his life. And she has her own life with her own kids and her own marriage, and what that means for him, and how people in his generation are both good and bad at different aspects of parenting. And same with people in my generation. That was the enriching agent that I thought was the most crucial to add.”

In holding with the emotional core of the documentary, Schur says he wished there to be actual friendships and lasting emotional relationships solid between Charles and the individuals who reside in the residence. “So, we basically invented a new best friend for him — a guy who would become his best friend — and that's the character Stephen McKinley Henderson plays,” says Schur. “His name is Calbert. And over the course of the season, we really in the writers' room talked about how ultimately — yes, this is a spy story, it's a comedy story, it's a story about families — but really it's a love story. And the relationship that you're following is the relationship between Charles and Calbert and their best friend romance is kind of the emotional core of the whole show.”

Ultimately, A Man on the Inside provides as much as one thing completely new for Schur, who additionally produced and wrote for The Office and co-created Parks and Recreation. “It's very different from everything else I've done,” he says. “I would say it's neither a sort of ensemble comedy set in a workplace, nor is it a theoretical musing about the nature of morality set in the afterlife — it's somewhere in between.”

All eight episodes of A Man on the Inside drop in November on Netflix.