As comedies face slashed budgets and cancellations amid industry turmoil, TV legend Mike Schur is weathering the storm better than others, with a new season of the Ted Danson-led “A Man on the Inside” launching on Netflix while he reunites with Amy Poehler for the upcoming Peacock series “Dig.”
“Making TV is really hard — It gets a lot easier when you have people like Amy or Ted or Andy Samberg or Kristen Bell,” Schur told TheWrap ahead of the Season 2 launch of “A Man on the Inside.” “Those people at the center of a show make the experience just so much more wonderful and delightful and easy and fun and collaborative.”
It was having Danson, with whom Schur had worked on “The Good Place,” at the center of “A Man on the Inside” that excited Schur when his producing partner, Morgan Sackett, brought the idea of adapting the documentary “The Mole Agent,” which follows an 83-year-old widower on an undercover mission at a nursing home, into a comedy series. “The themes of the documentary are very beautiful and universal, and after that, it’s just, ‘make a good ensemble comedy, put Ted at the center, bring in as many great actors as you can, and let the chips fall where they may,’” Schur said.
The heartwarming series, which also reunited Schur with “Brooklyn Nine-Nine” star Stephanie Beatriz and introduced some new faces as well, was a surefire success for Netflix, with “A Man on the Inside” debuting in late November 2024 as the streamer’s top TV show of the week and staying in the top 10 TV list for five weeks. Just weeks after its premiere Netflix gave the show — and Schur — the vote of confidence for Season 2, which challenged Schur to go beyond its basis from “The Mole Agent.”
With the first season forcing Danson’s Charles to confront his grief and get to the other side of it, Schur noted Charles had “leveled up” emotionally, and needed a new emotional challenge beyond processing the loss of his wife. The obvious place for Schur to take the second installment was then if Charles might be able to make space for another companion.
“A lot of the theme of the documentary is about taking risks, I think, at a time in your life when people are less likely to do that, just emotionally and in life in general,” Schur said. “It seemed like a good risk to take: Can I open my heart up and invite a new person in?”
The first person that came to mind for Charles’ romantic interest was, of course, Mary Steenburgen, because “she’s an Oscar-winning actress” and because “Ted is just generally happier when Mary’s around,” according to Schur. The creator designed the character of Mona specifically for Steenburgen, infusing her background as a singer into the character by making her a music professor, and crafted a dynamic for Charles and Mona that dovetailed with Danson and Steenburgen’s 30-year marriage.
“A lot of it came from just thinking about what would make Charles kind of scared,” Schur said. “If she were just a nice, pleasant lady who liked to sit in a chair and read books … that’s not that risky a venture, but … the real Mary loves to just careen around the corner and explore and just go on adventures. There’s a line in the show where Charles says, ‘I look both ways before crossing the street, and she does cartwheels in traffic.’”
Even with a new romance and university-set mystery, Charles still had plenty of visits from his friends at Pacific View Retirement Community, a move that felt crucial to Schur. “It was very important to us, and will continue to be if there are more seasons, that those people stay in his life,” Schur said. “Those are his friends, those are the people that he met who helped him process grief and helped him feel more alive on Earth, and they’re not going anywhere.”
Schur is simultaneously working on “Dig,” which hails from Universal Television, and received a series order in May. The idea for the series, which follows four women working at an archeological dig in Greece who uncover a long-buried secret, came from Poehler, who had been reading Kate Myers’ novel “Excavations,” and reached out to Schur about the idea of adapting it.
“When Amy says she wants to do something, my ears always perk up,” Schur said. “Amy and I obviously were partners for seven years on a show that changed both of our lives and which we both had have nothing but fond memories of, and the idea of collaborating with her again is a dream.”
Speaking of “Parks and Recreation,” Schur said he’s often asked about whether there could be a way to revisit the beloved series and characters, but noted there would have to be a compelling reason to return to Pawnee, Indiana and that might not be within the current political climate.
“That show was very much about the time and place where it was made, and about the mood of the country, and I think the mood of the country, I don’t think this is a controversial thing to say, is different now, and I don’t think it would make a lot of sense to do that,” Schur said. “I don’t think we would do it just to do it. I think if there were a compelling reason, we might think about it, but I also feel like we did what we wanted to do, we made our point, we ended it, and we all moved on. And I think there’s something kind of nice about that, too.”
Long gone are the days of 22-episode seasons from the likes of “Parks and Rec” or “Brooklyn Nine-Nine,” with Schur noting comedy writing happens differently now, with nearly every show having some serialized element of a cliffhanger made in an effort to get people to keep watching the season, and then get excited for the next. That’s not to say that shows of the early 2000s and 2010s didn’t also employ those elements, but, for Schur, the concept of hanging out with your favorite characters every weekday is gone.
“The deal with TV now in the comedy world is there’s no hangout show, there’s no ‘Friends,’ there’s no ‘Seinfeld,’ there’s no ‘Cheers,’ because you have eight episodes – you [have] to tell eight very tightly crafted stories, and you don’t get the chance to sink into those shows where … the stakes of the story aren’t hugely important,” Schur said. “I miss the days of just spending 20-25 minutes with the group of people that I liked.”
Schur added that with the death of the hangout comedy went the watercooler conversation that saw friends, family and coworkers discussing the latest episode of their favorite weekly TV show — which has also been decimated by the binge model. With hundreds of shows available to watch, the key is in captivating audiences’ attention “very quickly,” which Schur notes is why a murder mystery is a surefire way to draw in audiences, though he doesn’t think every show “should have to do that.”
“I think it would be better if there were a bunch of shows about just people milling around and running into each other in different ways and sharing their hopes and dreams,” Schur said. “People are still trying to make shows like that, and I hope they keep trying to make them. I’ll keep trying to make them, probably, and, we’ll see if we swing back in that direction.”
“A Man on the Inside” Season 2 is now streaming on Netflix.
