A Man on the Inside season two review – Ted Danson’s despicably bland show is everything wrong with TV

This is a cosy, lighthearted whodunnit about a retired professor who gets a second wind as a private eye. It’s also a bingo card for just about everything that makes streamer-era TV so patronising, uninspiring and mind-numbingly dull. On the surface, A Man on the Inside’s crimes might seem negligible: it’s a little schmaltzy, a little too pleased with itself in that wisecrack-stuffed American comedy way. Yet it’s exactly that inoffensiveness that makes this strain of television so insidious. When the New York Times critic James Poniewozik coined the term “mid TV” to describe the current “profusion of well-cast, sleekly produced competence” that has come to dominate our screens, it wasn’t so much a vicious takedown as a shrug at the blah-ness of it all. The tech giants have pummelled us into submission by siphoning off our time via OK entertainment. Admittedly, it’s a lot to lay at the door of an amiable mystery about elderly people. And this series is no worse than the majority of content pumped on to platforms nowadays. But it does unite an unusual number of modern TV’s most cynical methods. For a start, it trades blatantly on the past glories of its personnel. In this case, the headline creator-actor combo of showrunner Michael Schur, whose CV includes Parks and Recreation and The Good Place, and the venerable Ted Danson, who happened to star in the latter. Then – to hedge bets even further – there’s the IP groundwork. The first season of A Man on the Inside was based on a 2020 documentary called The Mole Agent, about a man who infiltrates a care home to investigate accusations of abuse. This show is far too anodyne to even entertain the notion of such mistreatment: instead, Danson’s Charles, at a loose end since his wife died, goes undercover in a retirement community in San Francisco to find the perpetrator of a jewellery theft – heartwarmingly rediscovering the friendship and connection his life has been lacking along the way. It’s the kind of pithy conceit that can become incredibly tedious when stretched thin over eight 30-minute episodes. Like many a streamer comedy-drama, the pace is glacial and the plot both predictable and loudly spoon-fed to us by the characters, which means it can be second-screened with ease. In other words, it’s just another symptom of our current tech hell: this is TV seemingly designed to be played ambiently while viewers scroll on a different device. And now, of course, the success of that original standalone idea – whose central mystery was resolved in the first outing – must be capitalised on. In season two, we reunite with Charles, who is craving another undercover challenge to get stuck into (his PI work now mainly involves exposing the affairs of married men). One second after informing his stony-faced, fun-sponge boss Julie of this desire, a college president bowls into her office with a yarn about a stolen laptop and a protest against the billionaire alumnus who has agreed to make a substantial donation to the school. I wonder who could pose as a harmless visiting professor and wheedle out the culprit? Loath to waste a scrap of audience investment, A Man on the Inside cannot simply wave goodbye to the season one characters who have zero connection to this new case, so retirement community manager Didi and residents Calbert, Virginia and Elliott are shoehorned into the action. More plausibly, Charles’s daughter and her family also return, and we meet Julie’s estranged ex-con mother and her eccentric boyfriend Apollo (Schur favourite Jason Mantzoukas), who provides the season’s only properly funny moments. Meanwhile, Charles gets some romance of his own courtesy of a freewheeling music professor played by Danson’s actual wife Mary Steenburgen. A Man on the Inside frequently recalls another series about citizen detectives made up of a mildly baffled 70-something man (or two) and a remorsely deadpan 30-something woman. Yet whereas Disney+’s Only Murders in the Building frantically pipes out jokes – some eye-rollingly old school, some ingeniously clever, some thrillingly edgy – this show limits itself to risk-averse humour; retaining the weighty themes (in this case old age and its attendant isolation) but failing to probe or subvert them. Eventually, the puzzle of the stolen laptop is solved in not exactly jaw-dropping fashion. But then you wouldn’t really watch A Man on the Inside for the mystery. Or the comedy. You’d watch it for the background noise; something to fill the silence while you look at something more interesting on your phone. •A Man on the Inside is on Netflix now.