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When The Mole Agent, a Chilean documentary, was nominated for the Oscar for the Best Documentary Feature, the chances of it being adapted into a comedy starring Ted Danson were slim, at best.
But that’s exactly what Morgan Sackett, the producing partner of The Good Place creator Mike Schur, thought when he watched the doc.
The film follows an elderly man who goes undercover in a nursing home to investigate claims that a resident was being mistreated.
The series takes a similar, if slightly more lighthearted, route with Danson playing retired professor Charles, who, after struggling to deal with his wife’s death and growing distant from his daughter Emily, played by Mary Elizabeth Ellis, spies a classified ad from private investigator Julie (Lilah Richcreek Estrada) and takes on a new adventure.
He goes undercover at the Pacific View Retirement Home in San Francisco to solve the mystery of a stolen family heirloom. But after meeting the residents, and boss Didi (Stephanie Beatriz), he realizes there’s a lot more life left to be had.
The series touches on themes such as aging, loneliness and friendship, albeit in a very funny way. Danson has said that he was inspired by his friend Jane Fonda, who still “had her foot on the gas pedal at 80”.
“It was lovely to be funny in the attempt of doing something serious,” he told Deadline in an interview alongside Schur, who serves as showrunner on the Universal Television-produced comedy.
The eight-part series also stars Stephen McKinley Henderson, Sally Struthers, Eugene Cordero, Margaret Avery, John Getz, Susan Ruttan, Lori Tan Chinn, Clyde Kusatsu, Marc Evan Jackson, Jama Williamson, Wyatt Yang, Deuce Basco, Lincoln Lambert and Kerry O’Malley.
It launches on Thursday November 21. Check in later this week for Danson and Schur’s hopes for a second season.
DEADLINE: You’ve both talked about how the themes of this series, aging, friendship, loneliness are an important conversation to have. How do you translate that into a show that is also funny?
MIKE SCHUR: Some of it is taking cues from the documentary, because the basic premise and some of the basic comedy is baked into the documentary. I laughed super hard when I watched it, and that’s a road map. You use that as your blueprint, and then you hire a bunch of really funny writers and really funny actors. Then, as we expanded on the documentary, we came up with new characters and new relationships and it just became a question of trying to design them comedically in a way that was still true to what the documentary presented. We used that as our North Star. We navigated by the documentary, and we tried to keep the tone and the comedy and the drama in line with what Maite Alberdi had originally done. That was the goal. I mean there are jokes that are definitely broader than the documentary. There are serious scenes that are more serious than the documentary. We didn’t look at it as boundaries, we looked at it as just a guide, a guide post for the series.
TED DANSON: The documentary was very, very sweet. It’s always funny and touching to watch a total innocent step into a job. I loved when he was trailing somebody down the hallway, and he was very close behind, and then immediately had to turn around and pretend to go the other way. I love humor where you can get as homeopathic as you can to the joke, so that there’s barely just the essence of the joke left and it’s funny, but not contrived. It was lovely to be funny in the attempt of doing something serious. My favorite humor is where the character has no idea how silly or funny they’re being because they are so intent on succeeding at whatever they’re trying to do.
DEADLINE: Mike, why do you take these big themes, whether it’s morality in The Good Place, or public service in Parks and Recreation and Brooklyn Nine-Nine and then combine them with big, dumb funny?
SCHUR: I think that all shows, no matter what kind of show they are, comedy, drama, even a sketch show, should be trying to say something about the world. It doesn’t need to be a huge, gigantic, important lesson. I don’t want to ever feel like I’m lecturing anybody. But they should have a point of view. They should have a theme, an idea, something that they are trying to comment about on the world around them. That’s my goal when I come up with an idea for a show. But also, I mean my comedy background, my heroes were Monty Python, early Woody Allen movies and Saturday Night Live. The thing that makes me laugh hardest always is a really dumb name. It’s pure Monty Python, which changed my life when I found them. The characters in these shows have ridiculous names. They always will. I will always give every character a first and last name, and most of them will be stupid. There is a woman in the second episode [of A Man On The Inside] who is a server in the restaurant at Pacific View. We named her Laverne and someone asked what’s her last name? I said, Her last name is Sernverlern. So her name is Laverne Sernverlern.
Sally Strothers [who plays Virginia] saw that in the script and couldn’t get over it like ruined it her day. It just makes me laugh. So, even when I am doing something that has a message or is trying to say something about friendship or community or aging or whatever, I’m still the dumb, giggly guy who wants all the characters to have stupid names, and that will never change. I make you this promise, it’ll never change.
DEADLINE: I didn’t notice that in the episode.
SCHUR: We didn’t say her last name. I’m not self-destructive. I’m not gonna have people say those names out loud. That would ruin the show, but you can see it in the credits. That is her name.
DEADLINE: Ted, what do you look for in a script?
DANSON: You always want to be kind of subversively funny. If you make me laugh, I’ll sit around for the next thing you want to say to me, even if it’s not funny. You’re intelligent because you made me laugh. I’m in a good mood. So go ahead. If I need to take a little medicine or go serious or whatever, I’m much more in the mood. I think it’s true in life, and it’s very true in something like this.
DEADLINE: It’s been about four years since the end of The Good Place. Did you pick up where you left off?
SCHUR: I would say so. We were in New York the day that The Good Place finale aired. It was January 31 2020 and six weeks later, the world shut down, and no one saw anybody for a long time. Even in the airport I started seeing people wearing masks and thinking ‘what the hell is going on?’ All of the world was disrupted, and our professional lives were disrupted in various ways, but we always wanted to do something again. Morgan Sackett, who’s my producing partner, Ted, David Miner, my manager and producer, we were always saying, ‘What do we do with Ted? Morgan is actually the one who came up with this idea, and he emailed me and said ‘We should remake the documentary into a show, and Ted should play the main part’. It was a weight off my shoulders. We sent him the documentary, and he loved it, and it all just sort of happened very quickly and effortlessly.
DANSON: I think we all want to be seen and known, and I’ve never been seen or known quite so much by any writer as I have been by Mike. I’ll go anywhere because I trust [him], he’s gone out of his way to see me, and I’m [his] forever. That’s how I feel, plus he’s a really good writer.
DEADLINE: How does he make you feel seen?
DANSON: He calls me and says how handsome I am. I just know that he knows where my strengths and weaknesses are as an actor, and he can then write accordingly, in a way that serves the piece, but serves me, and there’s more chance of being successful in what we’re trying to do, because he is that thoughtful.
SCHUR: There are jokes that Ted made on Cheers that I saw when I was nine years old, that I remember like it was yesterday. If you’ll allow me a brief story, there is a moment in Cheers where Sam Malone thought that he had gotten this woman pregnant, and he prays to God. He says, ‘If you get me out of this, I won’t have sex for a year’. Then the woman turns out not to be pregnant and people said that he prayed to God, so he’s got to carry through with this. It drives Sam crazy, because he’s Sam Malone. He goes to see a priest, and he’s asked the priest, ‘I made this promise, I’m not supposed to have sex for a year. What do I do?’ The priest says, ‘Well, you know, Sam, the church does recommend celibacy before marriage’. Sam laughs and says, ‘Oh, I’m sorry. You were serious’.
I remember it so clearly I can picture it right now. On The Good Place, we were doing an episode with Michael McKean in the final season, where he was holding a funeral for a snail. It’s hard to explain why if you haven’t seen it, but I was like, ‘I’m going to do that joke again. I’m going to write that joke again exactly as I remember it, and Ted is going to do it, and it’s going to be perfect’. Without telling [Ted], Michael McKean says he’s holding a funeral for a snail that he stepped on. And he says, [Danson’s] Michael, ‘Would you like to say a few words?’ The stage direction was Michael laughs and says ‘Oh, I’m sorry, you were serious’, and he did it exactly the way that I remembered it, and it was so wonderful. For his birthday, I had the editor on the show put the clips back to back, and I said, ‘You didn’t even realize I was doing this. But this is how indelible your performances are to me. This is how meaningful they are and how specific they are that I remember this from 38 years ago, and I made you do it again, and I didn’t tell you, and you nailed it’. So, I think that if I see him, it’s just because I love the way that he acts. I always have from the time I was nine years old and writing material for him is a daily dream and joy for me and I want to do it forever.
DEADLINE: I thought the most important relationship in the series was [Danson’s] Charles’ relationship with Calbert. That seems to sum up the show. How did you view that relationship?
SCHUR: We describe that in the writers’ room as the great love story of the show was Charles and Calbert. What I think is wonderful about the way it unfolds, is he doesn’t even show up until the third episode. When he shows up, it’s very off handed. Charles is looking to work him for information, that’s how you meet Calbert, it’s purely ‘This guy might know something that could help me’ and by the end of that episode, after Charles has gone through a lot of stuff and been punched in the nose and all this stuff, he was wandering around Pacific View at night, and he just feels antsy and he needs to talk to someone because he’s had a fight with his daughter, and he finds himself drawn to Calbert, and he just starts talking to him and they start playing backgammon. There’s something about Calbert that made Charles feel very innocent in a middle school way, like this guy could be his friend. From that point on, it just builds and builds and builds until by the end of the series, you’re like, ‘This is the most important relationship in the whole show’. I’m glad you felt that, because that was very much the intention.
DEADLINE: The other relationship that I felt was really important was with Gladys, who has Alzheimer’s dementia. It’s such a topic that is rarely shown on television. There’s such a sweet scene at the end of the season at the wedding where they are sitting next to each other. Can you talk to that?
DANSON: Susan Ruttan was the actress who played that, and she is such a fine actor. If she had had a false note in her performance, I think we would have been accused of manipulating a sad issue into something for our benefit, story wise, but she was just brilliant.
