A Man on the Inside: Netflix comedy leaves you with a ‘warm fuzzy feeling’

This eight-part Netflix comedy doesn’t have a particularly enticing premise, said James Hibbs in Radio Times: based on a 2020 Chilean documentary, it tells the story of a widower who goes undercover at a retirement community in San Francisco to find a missing necklace. But it has a stellar cast, led by Ted Danson, and it is made by Michael Schur, creator of hits such as “Parks and Recreation” and “The Good Place”. The result is a “light yet often deeply emotional series” that “wraps you up in its characters’ lives and leaves you with a warm fuzzy feeling at the end”.

Danson plays Charles, a retired professor who has taken a job with a private investigator (Lilah Richcreek Estrada) in a bid to distract himself from his grief. The mystery at the heart of it isn’t very compelling, and the series has more warmth than jokes, but Danson is superb.

“Old people’s foibles – ‘Where are my glasses?’ ‘They’re on your head!’ etc. – are rarely that funny to anyone other than old people,” said Benji Wilson in The Daily Telegraph; and “old people sparking up for new adventures can feel patronising”. But this series “is so well put together”, it avoids those problems. “I went into it with the sick bag at hand, just in case, and came out grinning from ear to ear.”