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, making fun of NPR (lovingly) on Parks, and being a life-long rule-follower. Also, our TV critic David Bianculli reviews the new series and says it's the sweetest show since Ted Lasso. Subscribe to Fresh Air's weekly newsletter for staff recommendations, gems from the archive, and a peek at what's coming next week.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy
Chapter 1: Who is Michael Schur and what shows has he created?
This is Fresh Air. 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, 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.
Chapter 2: What is the premise of the new show 'A Man on the Inside'?
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.
Look, I know that you don't like to talk about mom, so we don't have to, but you know that she would have wanted you to be a person, live your life. Okay, do you remember when I was little and you would give me Charles challenges? Like, find 10 out-of-state license plates or read 20 books before Christmas? I'm giving you a Charles challenge.
Find a project or a hobby, just something that excites you.
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?
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Chapter 3: What inspired the show 'A Man on the Inside'?
You've done so much about ethical decisions, especially like on The Good Place and the book that was almost like a companion to it. And one of the questions in the series is, is it okay for the Ted Danson character to go in and video and audio record people without their knowledge? Because he's there to spy. I mean, he's the John le Carré of assisted living. Right.
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're creating a pretense, a false pretense, and you're getting to know folks without them really knowing who you are. In the documentary, Sergio, the main character, ends up moving out without anyone noticing.
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 the reality of what he did and the circumstances under which he entered the facility.
You've worked with Ted Danson on two series.
Yeah.
On The Good Place and now on your new series, A Man on the Inside. I love watching him. I think he's like fantastic. What is great about working with him?
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Chapter 4: How does 'A Man on the Inside' portray assisted living?
Well, it's simply a question that I've been asking myself for a really long time. I used to play this game as I drove around in traffic in L.A. where someone would cut me off on the freeway or we would be in traffic and someone would pull onto the shoulder and speed past me and cut the line.
And as a way of trying to stem off what you would call road rage, I would play a game in my head where I would say that guy just lost 10 points. Like I was imagining a scenario in which there was some kind of omniscient observer of human behavior. And I satisfied my own anger or displeasure with other people by imagining that that cost them in some cosmic way.
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
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Chapter 5: What ethical questions does the show raise?
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.
Oh, one thing I thought was very clever. In the good place, when you're in the part that people think is heaven, you're not allowed to use four-letter words. You're not allowed to use expletives. So if you want to use the F word, you end up saying fork. Right. Now, since you can't use the F word on network television—
I thought like that is so clever because everybody will know the intent of the word because it's explained to you why somebody is using a word and then they just keep using it, you know, as necessary. So you're not saying the word, but everybody knows the word that you intend. Like, for instance, when you say fork, everybody knows exactly what you mean.
So is that in part a way of using the language that you wanted to use without having to use it?
Yeah, absolutely. This show is appearing on NBC at probably 8.30 on Thursday or something. And, you know, you can't say those words. So let's come up with a reason why you can't say them within the context of the show. It wasn't just that it was on NBC. Like, I wanted that show on. Ideally to be able to be watched by people of all ages.
And it was – I'm happy that that show was on NBC and not behind a paywall on a streaming service because I think that ultimately – my bet, which was just a conjecture at the time, but my bet was that kids would like it. And it turned out to be true when we entered the COVID era and everybody was having to go to school from home.
My wife said, you know, everyone in William, my son's class, is watching The Good Place right now. Like you should do like a fun extracurricular like Zoom class where you watch episodes of The Good Place and talk about philosophy. And I was like, I don't know. Like it feels – those kids are – poor kids are on Zoom like six hours, eight hours a day. And she was like, I think they would like it.
So I sent an email to the parents and we're like, if your kids would be interested in this, it's like a thing that we're all desperate for ways to occupy our kids' time these days. And immediately, like 30 kids showed up. And so I ended up teaching this kind of like fun sixth grade class on philosophy where we watched episodes of the show.
And then I talked about, you know, Aristotle or Kant or something. And it was really fun. And the kids were really into the show. And they really liked talking about that stuff. And the conjecture I had that kids would like it too, even though it was about a pretty arcane subject, turned out at least, again, anecdotally to be somewhat true.
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Chapter 6: What is it like to work with Ted Danson?
It's also the only place where we tell you what's coming up next week in exclusive. So subscribe at whyy.org slash fresh air and look for an email from Molly every Saturday morning. This is Fresh Air. I'm Terry Gross. Let's get back to my interview with Michael Schur, one of the people behind several beloved TV shows.
After writing for The Office, he co-created Parks and Recreation and Brooklyn Nine-Nine. He created The Good Place and the new series A Man on the Inside, starring Ted Danson, who also starred in The Good Place. So many comics, when they're young, like they're the class clown. They're the ones who's always getting punished for acting up.
They're the ones whose parents have to come and explain their child's behavior. And they're misfits. And then they find comedy and, you know, often become celebrities and are very well rewarded for it. But it sounds like you through your life, you were always like... Playing within the rules and that that was always important to you.
So as perhaps one of the minority members of comedy who played by the rules, how do you explain yourself?
Man, what a question. As far as I'm concerned, I, for whatever reason, and I don't know if it's... nature or nurture or a combo platter or what I was always an extreme rule follower my whole life. Like I, I have a very specific memory of being in kindergarten and being on the playground, like at recess, I think, or maybe before school.
And the teacher came out and went like, okay, everybody line up. And I immediately walked over and stood right in front of her. And the other kids were like still milling around and goofing around and laughing and playing, you know, with four square balls and stuff. And I remember thinking like, what are they doing? The teacher just said line up and they're not lining up.
And I remember actually getting kind of nervous of like, did they not hear her? Did they not understand English somehow? Like it was unfathomable to me that when – A teacher said, okay, it's time to do this thing that you wouldn't immediately do that thing. I was like that my whole life. And so that's actually been a problem for me, as you can imagine.
Like imagine how annoying it must be to be married to someone who has that kind of ethos. Like I have – it's something I've had to really work on of being a little more flexible, a little more relaxed about –
Following rules because no one no one loves a scold no one wants to have their finger wagged at them and I recognize this thing in myself a long time ago and I've really tried hard to not be a nuisance to other people while still kind of being true to what I see is the way that like the social order is kept.
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Chapter 7: How does philosophy influence Schur's writing?
How has that code worked for you working at networks? Because, like, the new series is on Netflix, but most of your shows were on network TV, on broadcast TV, where there's standards and practices and rules you have to obey and, you know, executives you have to answer to.
And your creative instincts might not be their instincts, especially if what they're going for is, you know, the biggest hit possible and what you're going for is a vision that you have.
My first job was at Saturday Night Live. Saturday Night Live is a big, messy swirl of craziness. It's a big, rambling, 90-minute-long live variety show where part of the fun is that people are making mistakes and coloring outside the lines and kind of – You know, like the actors start laughing in the middle of sketches sometimes if they're funny enough.
So that was actually really good for me to be in a place at the beginning of my career where it was like this is not rigid, right? This world is not about following rules so much.
And I'm just very glad that I became a comedy writer and not an insurance claims adjuster because I think if I were an insurance claims adjuster, I would be among the most insufferable people on the face of the earth given my proclivities.
You've worked very closely with Greg Daniels, who created the American version of The Office, and you co-created Parks and Rec with him. What are some of the things that you learned from him, from watching him work and from working with him, that have stayed with you and helped guide you in your independent projects?
I mean, he's very professorial, and he has a lot of lessons. And there were times, and I say this lovingly and positively. But there were times in the early going, Mindy Kaling and BJ Novak and I had never really written on TV shows before. And he was sort of a professor who was giving lectures in some way about TV writing. And
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Chapter 8: What makes 'The Good Place' unique in its approach to ethics?
you know he used to say that there's like a hierarchy of importance in a story and like the lowest level of importance is like one person who is comes in for one line and says one thing and makes one joke and then leaves and then the next level is like a minor character who has like a little scene here and there and you keep going up like a pyramid and you get to like side characters who have b and c stories and then you get to main characters and their love interests and
And you have to always be thinking about how much real estate you give different characters and people. And also you have to think about there might be some really funny joke that you come up with that's really wacky and wild. And if you give that joke to a character you've never seen before who pops in and says the joke and leaves, it doesn't really affect the show.
But if you give that same joke to the main character on the show, the person who the audience is the most invested in, now – That joke might have an outsized effect on the fabric of the show because it's just a much more important statement coming from a much more important person.
And you have to be really careful when you come up with jokes that sort of stretch the tone of the show or alter the themes of the show. You have to be really careful who says them and when and why. He just thinks so carefully and so studiously about what he's doing. He treats writing, specifically TV writing, with such care and consideration.
I just can't say enough good things about him as an instructor in the world of writing.
If you're just joining us, my guest is Michael Schur. He wrote for The Office and co-created Parks and Recreation and Brooklyn Nine-Nine and created The Good Place, as well as a new Netflix comedy series called A Man on the Inside. We'll talk more after a short break. This is Fresh Air. This is Fresh Air. Let's get back to my interview with Michael Schur.
He wrote for The Office, co-created Parks and Recreation and Brooklyn Nine-Nine, and created The Good Place.
He also created the new Netflix comedy series A Man on the Inside, starring Ted Danson, who's hired by a private investigator to go undercover as a new resident in an assisted living facility to investigate what's happened to a ruby necklace, an heirloom, that was presumably stolen from one of the residents.
So after The Office, when you and Greg Daniels decided to do another show together and you came up with Parks and Recreation, why did you want to set the show with a backdrop of a small town, Pawnee, Indiana, and their Parks and Recreation department and have the main character start off as the assistant director of the department?
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