Michael Schur on ‘A Man on the Inside,’ the Worst Ad Ever Made, and What Makes a Comedy a Comedy

Among the many delights in Michael Schur’s new Netflix comedy, “A Man on the Inside,” there’s an aptly covert one that may go overlooked. Actually, there’s eight. Depending on how you watch Netflix, they may not appear onscreen long enough to notice, but each episode title is a pun (or at least a play on words) referencing a well-known book, movie, or TV show about spies. There’s “The Man Who Knew Too Much About Bridges” (Episode 2), “Presents and Clear Danger” (Episode 5), “Our Man in Sacramento” (Episode 6), and my personal favorite from the premiere: “Tinker Tailor Older Spy.”

“We decided late in the game to name every episode after a famous spy story,” Schur said in an interview with IndieWire, adding he didn’t know offhand who came up with the title for Episode 1. “My guess would either be Megan Amram, who has worked with me on a lot of different shows over many years and whom you know. She is the pun master of all pun masters. But it could have also been Dan Schofield, who worked on ‘The Good Place’ as well with me and was also very good at that game. I think almost all of the episode titles were either Dan or Megan.”

Following their Peabody-winning success on “The Good Place,” Schur, a handful of his writers, and his A-list star, Ted Danson, have returned for a new sitcom about a retired architect and recent widower who’s hired by a private investigator to infiltrate a retirement community where a priceless family heirloom has gone missing. While “A Man on the Inside” may not answer life’s unanswerable questions like “The Good Place,” Schur’s latest does confront the often-intimidating topics of aging, dementia, and death — all in an honest-to-goodness comedy. It’s not a drama with a few random jokes, or even a “dramedy” (whatever that exhaustive, exhausting term implies.) It’s a sitcom. And proud of it.

Below, IndieWire spoke to Schur — who’s also an executive producer on “Hacks,” as well as the co-creator of “Parks and Recreation” and “The Office” (U.S.) — about the documentary that inspired his latest series, why audiences can trust in Ted Danson unreservedly, and the “silly” debate going around about what constitutes a TV comedy.

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity. For more from Mr. Schur, read the second part of IndieWire’s interview.

IndieWire: What about “The Mole Agent” inspired you to turn it into a sitcom? What core principle did you really want to focus on?

Michael Schur: I think that all great TV shows are, at some level, Trojan horses. If you’re saying, “Have you seen this show?” and your friend says, “No, what’s it about?” You give them a one sentence answer that sounds really compelling, right?

“Have you seen ‘The Sopranos’?”
“No, what’s it about?”
“It’s about this mobster who goes to therapy.”
[claps] “I’m in!”

And the reason that you need that Trojan horse is because if you said, “Have you seen ‘The Sopranos’?” And your friend said, “No, what’s it about?” And you said, “It’s a really in-depth existential examination of the human soul and whether or not we have, as human beings, the capacity to overcome what’s essentially dark and inhumane about us through experimentation in observing our own family’s history,” your friend would have already left the room and would not watch “The Sopranos.”

So for this show, “The Mole Agent” had a great Trojan horse to it. The premise is an 83-year-old widower answers an ad in the paper and becomes an undercover private detective. Great. My buddy will watch the show now. But what it’s really about is the loneliness epidemic in the world — about people who have been cut off from their friends and from their lives and the value of community and the ways that we can affect each other in different phases of our lives. It’s about aging, it’s about memory loss, it’s about death at some level. It just seemed like it was all presented to me like, “Here’s the Trojan horse hook, here’s the interesting set of themes that it’s really exploring.” There was nothing left to do except get Ted Danson to sign on, and then once he signed on, everything happened pretty easily.

That’s a great explanation that also helps clarify why a lot of my friends don’t listen to me about TV, since I tend to start with the deeper meaning.

Yeah, don’t do that, man. Just give ’em the hook. They’ll watch the show.

Tonally, “A Man on the Inside” feels distinct from your past entries, but still an evolution of where you were headed in “The Good Place” — do you have a word for it? A way to describe the tone you were going for? And how did you find it?

Tone is the hardest part of any show, I think. It’s the hardest thing to define. Oftentimes, a tone is defined by eliminating what is not the tone you want, and then eventually getting down to whatever’s left is the tone that you do want, which is a very tricky process. I said to the folks I pitched it to, “This is a comedy show. It’s going to be half-an-hour long. There will be jokes, there’s an inherently comedic situation. I’m going to hire mostly comedy writers to write it. But it’s also going to be deadly serious at times. It’s going to be very honest about aging and about death and about memory loss and a bunch of other things. And you need to be on board with that. You need to allow me to make a show that doesn’t cut every scene with a joke at the end to make sure people feel like it’s a comedy.”

Externally, I described the comedy to them as “gentle.” But the word I used internally — in my own head and with the writers, it’s a little more highfalutin — was “elegiac” because I felt very much like the comedy should always be in service of the themes of the show, which are not inherently funny. Aging isn’t inherently funny, nor is death, nor is memory loss. And the kinds of jokes I wanted to tell, or the kinds of comedy situations I wanted to create, had to be respectful of those themes.

That’s a tricky thing to do. The worst advertisement ever made in the history of America is the Six Flags ad where the old man is dancing to that awful song. I’m sorry to hold them to account, the poor Six Flags ad agency people, but the joke of that ad is: “Look at that old man being stupid. Look at that old man being ridiculous. Old men don’t dance like that. Ha ha ha.” Basically, my one goal is to never do anything in this show that evokes that response. These folks are not going skydiving. They’re not going to smoke crack and go rampaging through the streets of San Francisco. They’re going to be real people. We’re going to honestly portray what it’s like to be their age — and we can still be funny, we can still write jokes, and we can still come up with funny situations. But they’re not going to be dancing to that stupid song. Just being old is not funny. We’re not going to be laughing at them. They need to be the subject of the humor and not the object.

Ted Danson in ‘A Man on the Inside’Courtesy of Colleen E. Hayes / Netflix

I’m glad you brought up advertising, because I wanted to ask about audience expectations. We’re living in an era where, for a new movie or show, audiences are being told exactly what they’re going to see before they see it. But due to the success of your last show, your new show is being labeled as the “Good Place” creator’s follow-up to the “Good Place” with the star of “The Good Place.” Do you concern yourself at all that people will expect that exact show again instead of being open to the show you’ve made?

Honestly, that’s not a new problem. I remember when the movie “Free Willy” came out and at the end of the trailer, you see the whale [escape] into the distance. People lost their minds. They were like, “You just gave away the end of the movie in the trailer!” And I remember this article that said, “Our research shows conclusively that the more people know about the movie and what they’re going to see, the more they like it.” The reasoning was that movies were getting expensive even then. A night out is 60 bucks for the tickets and 30 bucks to park and 15 bucks for popcorn, and the worst thing that could happen is that you feel at the end of the experience that you were misled or betrayed.

So the tendency for the last 20, 30 years has been to make more and more people understand exactly what they’re going to get. I don’t blame anyone for that. It makes a lot of sense. The number of choices we have as consumers of entertainment have never been higher, and the number of hours in our days that are marked for leisure time have never been smaller. As a result, I think truth in advertising is a pretty good idea. When “Joker [2]” came out recently and people didn’t know it was a musical, that didn’t go so well.

Obviously, this show’s slightly different than “Joker Folie à Deux,” but I would say we have some advantages. First, I think the marketing team has done a very good job in terms of platforming the show and explaining what it is. But the thing that does that better than anything is Ted. I think when you see Ted in the poster and you know that this is a Ted Danson show, what comes with that is a feeling of safety — of like, “I’m in good hands. This guy, I’ve known him for 40 years. He is a known quantity, and he wouldn’t sign up for something that is going to hurt me in some way, or trick me in some way.”

The show is certainly different from other shows I’ve made in various ways. The humor is different and the themes are different, but I would like to think that given Ted and given the shows I’ve worked on, that when people watch this, they might like it, they might not, but I hope that they don’t feel like they were betrayed in some way or misled in terms of what they were going to experience.

I feel like it’s rare these days to see a true comedy deal with issues as honestly as this does, especially when the issues are as heavy as dementia and death. Norman Lear proved time and again that sitcoms could handle important topics with grace and gravity, but how do you trust that audiences will go along with it today? And in something this funny, not something that’s mainly dramatic or only funny when it’s convenient?

If you go back and watch “Cheers” in the early seasons, the episodes are 24 minutes and 33 seconds long. They are so funny, and the characters are so well drawn and wonderful. But that show would open up the entire third act of an episode for a two-person play between Shelley Long and Ted Danson, where they would be in some kind of intense romantic problem. It would be just the two of them in the darkened bar, and they would give you essentially straight drama for six minutes — just nothing but real conversation, delving into their real issues. Occasionally, there might be a joke here and there, but it was like watching a dramatic play.

Over time, 24 minutes and 33 seconds went all the way down to 20 minutes and 48 seconds or whatever, and what’s the first thing that’s going to go when you’re crunching [for time]? The first thing that’s going to go is anything that isn’t a joke, right? So those shows over time got less and less interested in interrogating the parts of the relationships that were not poppy and catchy and snappy and funny and worthy of being in a trailer. I think we lost something with that.

I mean, look: There were plenty of shows over the years that were just purely interested in comedy, but there were other shows that were interested in doing both. Like you said, Norman Lear’s shows are a perfect example. We lost that somewhere along the way, and what came up in their place were shows that started with dramatic bones and you would drop little bits of comedy here and there and then you would say, “It’s a comedy!” But they weren’t really. I mean, we all know the difference between a comedy and a drama. We can tell it immediately when we watch it. We know what the writers are interested in, we know how the actors are playing the parts.

All this debate that’s gone on in recent years about, “Should this show be categorized this way or should this show be categorized that way?” — it’s all kind of silly. There’s an answer, and we all know what the answer is. Some of that stuff is just networks manipulating awards show seasons and stuff like that, and sometimes there are shows that are genuinely genre-less. There’s enough TV now that there are legitimately shows that are kind of a messy middle of the genre swirl. So we’ve got this entire wide range now.

I think that [“The Mole Agent”] is, in its premise, a comedy, and while it’s exploring the essential comedy of its premise, it determines and discovers that there is a lot of very earnest and serious drama to be found within that comic premise. Do you want to call that a comedy? I do. I think that’s a comedy show. I think that the jumping-off point, the beginning of it, the structural foundation, the scaffolding is comedic, and that’s what makes it a comedy. The drama is the stuff that happens in between.

So if the premise were really dark and serious and dramatic and then we added jokes, I would say that’s a drama. But this, to me, is a comedy because what we’re interested in is the comic idea and the comic premise of a man answering an ad and becoming a private detective at age 76. Along the way, the truth of the situation for folks his age is that they go through a lot of dramatic stuff. So we look at that stuff straightforwardly and sincerely, and we do it honestly, or as honestly as we can. And what you have at the end of the day is a half-hour show that I would absolutely defend as a comedy that also has a bunch of serious stuff in it.

Well put. Completely unrelated, I’d be remiss not to congratulate you on “Hacks” winning Best Comedy Series at the Emmys this year.

Thank you. Thank you very much.

“A Man on the Inside” is available now on Netflix.