Happy endings aren’t as easy to pull off as they seem. Storytellers can’t just give the audience what they want and call it a day; they have to make sure their characters earn the uplift; they have to show the work they’ve done to get there; they have to build significance into those final moments so everyone can share in the good vibes.
Just look at “A Man on the Inside.” At the start of the first season, Charles Nieuwendyk (Ted Danson) is a grieving widower who’s so lonely he comes out of retirement to take on a new job as a spy for a private investigator. Charles is just looking to fill the days, perhaps by doing a little good, but mainly because the gig sounds fun and exciting — two qualities missing from his quiet, empty house. Before, he was an engineering professor. Now, he gets to pretend to be George Smiley.
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But by the end of Season 1, Charles is left with far more than his own John le Carré story to tell at dinner parties. He actually has friends who would show up if he cooked them a meal.
“The theme of the whole show is that Charles Nieuwendyk thinks that life doesn’t really have anything left to offer him,” series creator Mike Schur told IndieWire as part of a recent USG University Panel. “He takes this job on a whim, he gets embedded in this senior living facility, and it completely saves him, really. It turns him from a person whose life is very small into a person who has all these new friends and these new experiences.”
Schur knew the ending of Season 1 needed to acknowledge as much, which is why it takes place at the nursing home where Charles was working. Two residents, Elliott (John Getz) and Virginia (Sally Struthers), get married — a staple of happy sitcom endings — and their reception is at the Pacific View Retirement Community. Didi (Stephanie Beatriz), the managing director, oversees the whole thing, as various other characters get their own blissful send-offs.
“It had to end on that set with those people,” Schur said. “There’s a lot of happy endings based on the people that Charles met and befriended.”
But even those happy endings are building toward the ultimate payoff: Charles’ reunion with Calbert, his best friend at the facility, played by Stephen McKinley Henderson.
“The real thing that’s going on, though, is that the true love story of the season — which is what we talked about in the writers’ room from the beginning — is between Charles and Calbert,” Schur said. “[It’s] the thing Charles needed more than anything in the world, which is just a good friend; a person who understood him and who could be his confidant and his partner in crime. So we knew that the very end was always going to be the two of them alone playing backgammon and just being happy and enjoying themselves.”
For Danson, the magic of the ending was twofold, and it started with the perfect song.
“First off, you play ‘Some Enchanted Evening’ [by The Temptations] and I’m gone,” Danson said. “It’s such a beautiful, nostalgic piece, especially for the age group we were portraying — not portraying, are.”
The second ingredient was Henderson himself.
“The relationship to Calbert is easy,” Danson said. “You just go sit next to Steven McKinley Henderson. He’s such a fine actor, and his level of truth and honesty and simplicity is so powerful. He just sucks you into it. From the moment we met and started acting, there was never any, like, preparation. It was just, ‘Say the words and fall into them’ — literally. I think we found each other as actors and admired each other and loved on each other just like the characters did.”
After bonding over backgammon throughout Season 1, Charles and Calbert’s friendship fizzles when Charles has to tell him that he’s been lying about his identity as part of his undercover work. But they find their way back to each other, and the final scene sees the two of them — in classic rom-com fashion — locking eyes from across the room, knowing exactly what the other is thinking.
“I love that little moment: the subtlest nod [from Charles] and then Calbert subtly nods, and they both know what it means, which is let’s play some backgammon,” Schur said. “So it was a true rom-com wrap-up, but the romance isn’t an actual romance like Elliot and Virginia. The romance is a friendship between Charles and Calbert. That was the design of it.”
For more on the craft that went into “A Man on the Inside‘s” perfect ending, watch IndieWire’s full video interview with Schur, Danson, Stephanie Beatriz, production designer Ian Phillips, and cinematographer David J. Miller above.
“A Man on the Inside” is streaming on Netflix.
IndieWire partnered with Universal Studio Group for USG University, a series of virtual panels celebrating the best in television art from the 2024-2025 TV season across NBC Universal’s portfolio of shows. USG University (a Universal Studio Group program) is presented in partnership with Roybal Film & TV Magnet and IndieWire’s Future of Filmmaking. Catch up on the latest USG University videos here or directly at the USG University site.
