Ted Danson’s great Netflix show looks like a sitcom, but it’s something else.

In Maite Alberdi’s documentary The Mole AgentAn elderly Chilean man goes undercover to a nursing home to investigate allegations that one of the residents is being abused and exploited. In A man insideThe new Netflix series, which is based – very loosely – on Alberdi’s film, lowers the stakes considerably. Instead of abusing the elderly, Charles Nieuwendyk (Ted Danson), a retired engineering professor and recent widower, is tasked with tracking down the person behind the disappearance of a ruby ​​necklace that may not have been worth that much. As in the other worlds Michael Schur has created, no one here is cruel or mean in a particularly damaging way – not once The good placeHis demons were more like gloating pranksters than the embodiment of evil. Occasionally tempers are tight and there are many misunderstandings, but for the most part everyone does their best and it is rarely enough.

When he is first hired by a private detective looking for an accomplice, The Mole AgentSergio, who is over 80, struggles with the simplest of tasks: just mastering the photo app on a smartphone is a challenge, and forgetting how to successfully make a FaceTime call. Charles is a bit more tech-savvy, but even though he knows his way around an iPhone, he’s completely lost when it comes to deception. When his future employer Julie (Lilah Richcreek Estrada) asks him to secretly take a photo of two strangers, Charles ends up posing for selfies with them, reflecting both his lack of relaxation and his longing for human connection. A year after his wife’s death, Charles lives alone in his spacious modernist home, reading spy novels and occasionally cutting out a newspaper article to send to his daughter Emily (Mary Elizabeth Ellis), with a scribbled note in the margin: “Fascinating! ” She’s only a two-hour drive away, but she’s busy raising three teenagers, and besides, she and her dad were never really close. Her mother, she explains, was the one she could talk to. Dad was the one you would turn to to find the most efficient route from point A to point B.

Underlying A man insideis eight half-hour episodes featuring names and faces familiar from previous Schur shows, such as: Parks and Recreation And Brooklyn Nine-Nineis 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 elderly 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 worse. If Charles is a lousy spy, especially in the beginning, it’s partly because he has no experience in the art of deception, but it’s also, we understand, because his people skills have been atrophying for years , since he swapped the university lecture hall for a… He did a silent crossword puzzle at the breakfast table (in ink, of course) and spent months with his grief being his main companion. He’s supposed to keep a low profile and not draw the attention of the other residents, but when a man who looks like Ted Danson enters a facility where there are more women than men, it’s an impossibility and attention hits him like a narcotic – well, that and the weed he smokes after his welcome party.

The show evolves gently over the course of the first season as Charles fends off the crush of another resident (Sally Struthers) and the stuttering hostility of her former boyfriend (John Getz). He finds a friend in Calbert (Stephen McKinley Henderson), who discusses her strained relationships with her children over late-night backgammon, and an ally in Beatriz’s Didi, an endlessly patient and cheerful administrator who burns off stress by focusing on the work under her Floor lays desk with a pair of noise canceling headphones. The investigation never quite ends, but since the presence of a hard-hearted thief who steals valuable heirlooms from the weakest would break the gentle, soporific tones of the series, it quickly becomes clear that the crime thriller is not a crime thriller, but a crime thriller Explanation will act why that It wasn’t what we thought. In the first episode, Didi takes Charles on a tour of the facility, and the way he resists her offer to show him the memory care wing of the building tells you everything you need to know about where the story is actually going leads.

If streaming shows can suffer from an over-reliance on twists that make viewers eager to push to the “Next Episode” button rather than risk any hint of closure, A man inside wanders in the opposite direction and unrolls in a leisurely stroll. Without the structure of a network show’s plot breaks or the on-air sitcom’s compulsion to always jump to the next laugh line, the series simply pushes forward in a friendly manner on the grounds that you’d rather soak in its hot bath than risk it Change the channel and catch a cold. (The silliest gags are reserved for the end credits, where several characters are assigned last names that are never spoken on screen, like Chagughlaight-Accourse and Autumnal-Stojakovic.) But once you get the hang of it, it’s a cozy mystery Sitcom clothing, you might just like this Warmth.