Only our current tech hellscape could create a comedy so insidiously inoffensive. Prepare to be pummelled into submission as your time is siphoned off by OK entertainment
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his 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.
