Michael Schur wrote for the The Office, and created The Good Place, and co-created Parks and Recreation and Brooklyn Nine-Nine. His new show for Netflix, A Man on the Inside, features Ted Danson as a widowed retiree who goes undercover in a retirement community. He spoke with Terry Gross about the series.Later, comic and Silicon Valley actor Jimmy O. Yang talks about his new Hulu series, Interior Chinatown. He plays a waiter who inadvertently becomes central to a crime story.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy
Chapter 1: Who is Michael Schur and what shows has he created?
From WHYY in Philadelphia, I'm Terry Gross with Fresh Air Weekend. Today, the co-creator of the TV series Parks and Recreation and Brooklyn Nine-Nine, who also created The Good Place and wrote for The Office, Michael Schur. He has a new comedy series called A Man on the Inside. Like The Good Place, it stars Ted Danson and draws on philosophy and ethics.
Later, a talk with comic and actor Jimmy O. Yang. He stars in the new Hulu series Interior Chinatown. Yang is known for his roles in Crazy Rich Asians and the TV series Silicon Valley. He's also done stand-up specials and wrote the memoir How to American, an immigrant's guide to disappointing your parents. That's coming up on Fresh Air Weekend. This is Fresh Air Weekend. I'm Terry Gross.
My guest, Michael Schur, is one of the people behind some of the most beloved TV comedy series of the recent past. He wrote for The Office, co-created and wrote for Parks and Recreation and Brooklyn Nine-Nine, and created and wrote for The Good Place. He created the new comedy series A Man on the Inside. All eight episodes just started streaming on Netflix.
Before we hear from him, our TV critic David Bianculli is going to review the series. David says there's a couple of things that A Man on the Inside has in common with The Good Place. They both star Ted Danson, who became a star playing the bartender on Cheers, and both shows are entertaining and surprisingly philosophical. Here's David's review.
In The Good Place, series creator Michael Schur put an awful lot of trust in Ted Danson, not only in his audience appeal, but also in his acting ability. That series was about a woman, played by Kristen Bell, who awakens in the afterlife with Ted Danson as her guide. Its brilliant twist, revealed after a full season, was that Danson's character wasn't who he pretended to be.
It required the actor to switch gears significantly in midstream, and Danson was great at it. And in A Man on the Inside, the new Netflix TV show re-teaming Shure as series creator with Danson as star, the story starts with him pretending once again. Improbably but charmingly, this new eight-episode comedy series is based on a documentary from Chile.
Called The Mole Agent, and also available now on Netflix, it was nominated for an Oscar in 2021 and shown on the PBS series POV that same year. It told the true story of an elderly man hired by a detective agency to go undercover in a nursing home. The client's mother, a resident of the home, complained of the theft of a family heirloom.
So the detective agency advertised for an elderly man, hoping to place him in the home temporarily to find the culprit. Inspired by this story, Michael Schur starts his version by introducing us to Ted Danson's character of Charles in a home movie flashback from his wedding day many decades ago. Then it cuts to Charles in the present day in Oakland, California.
He's a widower, a retired professor, and even though his daughter and her husband and kids live nearby, has a rigid and solitary daily routine. That routine is interrupted one day by a suggestion from that daughter, Emily, played by Mary Elizabeth Ellis.
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Chapter 2: What is the premise of A Man on the Inside?
Find a project or a hobby, just something that excites you. Okay.
Okay. It's a good challenge. I accept. To widen his horizons, Charles answers a classified ad in the newspaper, which had been placed by a private investigator named Julie, played by Lila Rich Creek Estrada. It listed a job offer for a male between 75 and 85. Because he could use a cell phone, Charles is hired by Julie to infiltrate the nursing home for a month or so.
A mission Charles feels more optimistic about than his employer.
Okay, we are meeting with Deborah Santos Cordero. She goes by Dee Dee. She's the executive director. The whole staff reports to her. I am your loving daughter, Emily.
Why can't you be Julie?
Well, you're online in a bunch of places as having a daughter named Emily, but there aren't any pictures of her linked to you, so the name is all that matters. Plus, it's just better to keep your cover story as simple as possible.
Cover story?
Yes, cover story. Keep it together, man. You ready?
Well, I don't know, but it hardly matters. What matters is you think I'm ready.
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Chapter 3: What themes does A Man on the Inside explore?
He makes friends, and he is part of a community, and he finds a certain kind of purpose in just being around other people. And what was remarkable to me about the documentary, among other things, is that everyone I know who saw it had the same exact feeling, which was I should call my mom or I need to call my grandpa or I should hang out with my kids more.
Like it really had this universal effect on people of making them want to reach out to people that they love. And, you know, it's a rare piece of art, I think, that can cause everyone to have such a warm and positive feeling. So, you know, my longtime producing partner, Morgan Sackett, said we should remake that and have Ted play the main part.
And as soon as he said it, I just knew he was right and that there was a very good, slightly fictionalized show that could hopefully sort of give people that same feeling. That was the objective.
Did you do research going into an assisted living facility?
Yes, we did a lot of it. We went into a number of them in the California area, talked to a lot of people toward the memory care units and the rooms and met a lot of really wonderful people whose job it is to look after folks when they check in. And it was eye-opening, I have to say.
It was not maybe what you would expect, which is to say, I think your instinct would be that these are sad places because it's folks who are nearing the end of their lives and A lot of them are suffering from various ailments, physical or mental. But they were places of happiness and joy, largely.
They were sort of flourishing communities of people who were very happy to be with each other and to be part of a community. And that sort of matched up with what I was hoping for.
I'm glad that was your experience. I apologize in advance for being Ms. Buzzkill. But my father was in assisted living for a few years toward the end of his life. And I helped him move in. I visited a lot, even though I live far away. But he told me on the phone at the beginning, you know, there's no one I can talk to here. Everybody's like in cognitive decline.
And then I felt like, oh, come on, you know, I'm sure it's not that bad. And so the next time I visited him, a woman came up to me and said, hi, nice to meet you. My name is, and I was a school librarian for many years. And I thought, see, you know, she was a school librarian. She's got to be, you know, pretty smart.
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Chapter 4: How did Michael Schur get inspired by the Chilean documentary?
Yeah, well, that is 100% a huge part of the experience of being in these facilities, no question. There are folks who have moved in for a very wide range of reasons, and one of them is cognitive decline. But at least in the facilities that we toured, there is another part of it that's just folks who maybe they had a physical ailment or maybe they just were tired of living alone.
And they wanted to be around other people. And that's at least the part of it that we mainly focused on, although we didn't shy away from the actual realities of assisted living. If we had pretended like that wasn't a part of it, I don't think we would have been giving an honest portrayal of what it's really like.
You know, you've done so much about ethical decisions, especially like on The Good Place and in the book that was almost like a companion to it. And one of the questions in the series is, is it OK for the Ted Danson character to go in and video and audio record people without their knowledge? Because he's right. He's there to spy. I mean, he's the John Le Carre of assisted living.
And, I mean, he's even reading a John le Carre book in bed before the plot kicks in, before he knows about this job. Yeah. So, yeah. And the episode's called Tinkered Taylor, Older Spy.
Yeah.
A great title. But anyway, so he's, you know, one of the questions is, is it ethical to record people without their knowledge? Did you think about that a lot?
Oh, we did ask ourselves as writers over the course of the show whether what Charles was doing was, strictly speaking, ethical. It's a question that the documentary asks, too. You know, you're creating a pretense, a false pretense, and you're getting to know folks without them really knowing who you are. The way we decided to answer that question—
In the documentary, Sergio, the main character, ends up moving out without anyone learning what he was really there for. He doesn't get caught. And we decided that what was important was for Charles to suffer the consequences of having been essentially dishonest to the folks that he was interacting with. And so that is a part of our show in the final episodes. He does have to confront Charles.
The reality of what he did and the circumstances under which he entered the facility.
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Chapter 5: What ethical questions does A Man on the Inside raise?
And so after Parks and Recreation ended and Brooklyn Nine-Nine was up and running and my friend Dan Gore who created with me was running that show every day. NBC very kindly said, you can sort of do whatever you want, and we'll give you at least one season on the air.
So I had been thinking about that game I played in my head about other people and about myself and judging my own behavior and doing things that I knew were maybe slightly iffy and how many points I lost or how many points I gained when I did certain things. And so that became the idea that I just liked the most of the ideas that I had. And I
I just pursued that and thought, all right, 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'll work. I just sort of rolled the dice, and I'm glad I did because the experience of working on it was wonderful. It was a big hit.
Yeah, I mean, as far as you can determine anything these days is a big hit, it was at least a show that people watched and seemed to enjoy, and it seemed to resonate with people.
Which played a bigger role in your life, religion or philosophy, when you were coming of age?
Oh, philosophy by far. I say that only because I had no religion really to speak of. My father's side of the family are Jewish, but my grandfather, his father, renounced Judaism when he was very young and became a devout atheist. My mother's side of the family was raised vaguely Methodist, I would say, but... I had no religious upbringing at all.
When I got to college I took a couple philosophy classes and really liked the way that philosophy was able to talk about ethics and morality and other topics without
limiting them in many cases without limiting them to who can apply for this right like that was always one of my problems with organized religion was that it was like this is the way the world works but it's only for this group of people it's not for that group of people it's only for you over here if you believe these sets of things we told the marketing team
When we were coming up with posters and advertising materials for the show, no harps, no puffy white clouds, no halos. This is not a show about Christianity. This is a show about philosophy.
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Chapter 6: How does Ted Danson contribute to the show?
Okay. Now it's time for Jazz Plus Jazz Equals Jazz. Today we have a recording of Benny Goodman played over a separate recording of Miles Davis.
Research shows that our listeners love jazz. Jazz.
I love it. So do you remember who came up with that and why? And also, I want to know, didn't you think, no one's going to get this? Like 1% of your audience is going to get the joke.
It's a little rarefied, but I'll bet if you did a Venn diagram of Parks and Recreation watchers and NPR listeners, it's a pretty big intersection. Like it's not the craziest thing in the world, right? And also the joke works whether you know who those people are or not. If you've never heard their names, it still is funny. It's a funny little MC Escher logic loop that we wrote out there.
But, you know, there were a number of times that Leslie went on the local NPR station over the years, and it was just our chance to, like, make little jokes about the reality of listening to NPR. And that one, I don't remember who, I wish I remembered who pitched that. My guess would be that it was Ayesha Muharra, who was a writer on the show the whole time.
who loved NPR and she always loved writing those scenes and pitching jokes for those scenes. She's a wonderful writer. She writes on Hacks now, which is another show that I executive produce. But it was always fun to do NPR jokes. It was always a favorite exercise.
We had to kind of stop ourselves from having her go on too much because we could have done it in every episode and had plenty to make fun of. Lovingly, lovingly, I should add.
I should mention the voice of the public radio host was Dan Castellanata. Am I saying his name right?
Castellanata, yeah, from The Simpsons, yes.
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Chapter 7: What is the significance of comedy in serious topics?
Yeah, I mean, the biggest change, obviously, is just the shift to the streaming model. The Office, we did 28 episodes one year, I think, or maybe 30. The typical season was 22 episodes or 24 episodes, and now a season of TV is eight half hours, usually. And that just completely changes the way you tell stories, right?
The advantage TV always had over movies was you could, in success, watch a set of characters live and change and grow over many, many, many years. And now you're talking about, you know, maybe two seasons of eight episodes and then you're done. So TV writing is much closer to movie writing, I think, than it was when I was first breaking in. There's nothing you can do about it.
That's the world we live in. But I do mourn a little bit the loss of the old system. I think during COVID, people revisited old shows that had 200 episodes, like Friends and Cheers and whatever.
The Office.
Yeah, and The Office, right.
It's still on Comedy Central. Yeah.
Yeah. And you can sit 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 people a lot of comfort. That's what we're losing. And that's what I mourn the most about the new system is we're just sort of losing what to my mind was the the inherent advantage that TV storytelling had over movies or anything else.
I would imagine you have a lot of money. No, I'm not going to ask the question you think I'm going to ask. At least I don't think it's the question you think I'm going to ask.
The timing of that was so perfect, though. Terry, comedic timing was A-plus on that statement.
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Chapter 8: What were Michael Schur's influences growing up?
I'm not saying I want someone to die. So what are you saying? Well, I'm saying if someone's already dead, I would like to be the person who'll find the body. That's weird, man. Okay, you know how in cop shows, there's usually a cold open? Cold open. The first scene before the main titles. Right.
Okay, so for a couple of minutes, you follow this random character who you've never met, who's not one of the leads. And part of you is thinking, why am I even watching this guy? Why are you watching this guy? You're watching because either he's about to get killed, or... Or... You've seriously never seen a cop show? How is that even possible? Video games and weed. Okay. What was I saying?
Somebody's about to find a dead body? Yes, that's the rule. The person in the first scene of a procedural is either a victim or a witness. Holy .
Somebody threw away an entire Peking duck with the sauce and everything.
You're a , man. I'm the . You were the one who was hoping it was a dead person.
Jimmy O. Yang's character, Willis Wu, then does witness a crime, and that launches him into the center of the story. The show takes place in an off-kilter version of Chinatown, both real place and the setting of a TV police procedural called Black and White.
The show Interior Chinatown, like the book it's based on, is a funny, dramatic, fantastical take on the role Asian Americans play in pop culture and in real life. And it's a perfect fit for Jimmy O. Yang. A lot of his comedy is about what it means to be Asian in America. He was born in Hong Kong. His family immigrated to Los Angeles when Jimmy was 13.
He found comedy while still in college and started performing in clubs almost every night. His big acting break came in 2014 when he was cast in the HBO comedy Silicon Valley. roles in the films Crazy Rich Asians and Patriot's Day were to follow. He has numerous stand-up specials, and he wrote a book called How to American, An Immigrant's Guide to Disappointing Your Parents.
Jimmy O. Yang, welcome to Fresh Air.
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