In Maite Alberdi’s documentary The Mole Agent, an elderly Chilean man goes undercover inside a nursing home to investigate charges that one of the residents is being abused and taken advantage of. In A Man on the Inside, the new Netflix series based—very loosely—on Alberdi’s movie, the stakes are lowered substantially. Rather than elder abuse, Charles Nieuwendyk (Ted Danson), a retired professor of engineering and recent widower, is employed to root out the person behind the disappearance of a ruby necklace that may not have been worth that much in the first place. As is true of the other worlds created by Michael Schur, no one here is cruel or mean-spirited in any particularly pernicious way—even The Good Place’s demons were more like gleeful pranksters than the embodiment of evil. Tempers occasionally run short, and misunderstandings abound, but for the most part, everyone tries their best, and it’s rarely enough.
When he’s first hired by a private eye looking for an accomplice, The Mole Agent’s Sergio, who is in his 80s, struggles with the simplest of tasks: Just mastering a smartphone’s photo app is a challenge, and forget about successfully placing a FaceTime call. Charles is a little more tech-savvy, but while he knows his way around an iPhone, he is utterly lost when it comes to subterfuge. Asked by his prospective employer, Julie (Lilah Richcreek Estrada), to take a surreptitious snap of two strangers, Charles ends up posing for selfies with them, reflecting both his lack of chill and his yearning for human connection. A year after his wife’s death, Charles lives alone in his spacious modernist house, reading spy novels and clipping out the occasional newspaper article to send to his daughter, Emily (Mary Elizabeth Ellis), with a scrawled notation in the margins: “Fascinating!” She’s only a two-hour drive away, but she’s busy raising three teenage boys, and besides, she and her father were never exactly close. Her mother, she explains, was the one she could talk to. Dad was the one you’d go to for the most efficient directions from Point A to Point B.
Underlying A Man on the Inside’s eight half-hour episodes, which feature names and faces familiar from previous Schur shows like Parks & Recreation and Brooklyn Nine-Nine, is an understanding that life is hard enough without introducing the conflicts and threats that are usually the stuff of drama. The biggest threat to an older person’s well-being, explains the home’s director, Didi (Stephanie Beatriz), isn’t illness or injury: It’s loneliness, a condition that survival only makes more acute. If Charles makes a lousy spy, especially at first, it’s partly because he’s unpracticed in the art of subterfuge, but it’s also, we come to understand, because his people skills have been atrophying for years, as he’s traded the college lecture hall for a quiet crossword at the breakfast table (he does it in ink, of course) and spent months with his grief as his primary companion. He’s supposed to be keeping a low profile and not drawing the other residents’ notice, but when a man who looks like Ted Danson walks into a facility where women outnumber men several times over, that’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 its first season, as Charles fends off a crush from another resident (Sally Struthers) and the sputtering hostility of her sometime-boyfriend (John Getz). He makes a friend in Calbert (Stephen McKinley Henderson), talking over late-night backgammon about their strained relationships with their children, and an ally in Beatriz’s Didi, a boundlessly patient and upbeat administrator who burns off stress by laying on the floor under her desk with a pair of noise-canceling headphones. The investigation never quite goes away, but because the presence of a hard-hearted thief who swipes precious heirlooms from the most vulnerable would explode the series’ softly lulling tones, you realize quickly that the mystery won’t be a whodunit 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 facility, and the way he balks at her offer to show him the building’s memory-care wing tells you all you need to know about where the story is actually headed.
If streaming shows can suffer from an overreliance on twists, desperate to propel viewers toward the Next Episode button rather than risk any hint of closure, A Man on the Inside errs in the opposite direction, unrolling at a leisurely stroll. Without the structure of a network show’s act breaks or the broadcast sitcom’s imperative to always be driving to the next laugh line, the series just kind of drifts along amiably, counting that you’d rather soak in its hot bath than risk changing the channel and catching a chill. (The goofiest gags are reserved for the end credits, where several characters are assigned last names, never spoken on screen, like Chagughlaight-Accourse and Autumnal-Stojakovic.) But once you’ve caught on to the fact that it’s a cozy mystery in sitcom clothing, you might just enjoy the warmth.