‘Parks & Rec’ cocreator Mike Schur made being the nicest guy in Hollywood a career path

• Mike Schur is known for clever, kind-hearted TV shows like “Parks and Recreation” and “The Good Place.”
• His latest Netflix series, “A Man on the Inside,” is a sweet, emotional comedy about aging.
• Schur explained to BI why all his shows have a central theme of hope and his philosophy as a boss.

A local parks department. A police precinct. Purgatory. None of these locations is a particularly fun or exciting place to spend time. That is, unless you’re watching a Mike Schur show.

The creative force behind comedies such as “Parks and Recreation,” “Brooklyn Nine-Nine,” and “The Good Place” has a knack for creating hit TV shows that transform otherwise mundane settings into fully realized worlds populated with unique, funny, and fallible but always redeemable characters.

In Schur’s latest show, Netflix’s “A Man on the Inside,” his characters find (platonic, romantic, and even familial) love in yet another hopeless place: a retirement home.

Based on the 2020 Oscar-nominated Chilean documentary “The Mole Agent,” the series follows Charles (Ted Danson), a retired and recently widowed professor who finds new purpose in his golden years when he’s tasked with going undercover at a retirement home for a special investigation.

Though a central mystery anchors the series, as Charles must befriend Pacific View’s residents and staff to figure out who stole a resident’s family heirloom, “A Man on the Inside” is more interested in what brings its characters together, not the crime that threatens to drive them apart.

“Part of the goal of the show was to say we are very nervous when we talk about aging in this country. We walk on eggshells about it,” Schur told Business Insider. “But the flip side of that is that if people are just sharing their lives with other people, that can be much better than living alone regardless of what age you are, and certainly as you get older.”

This kind-hearted ethos is a hallmark of Schur’s comedies. After all, this is someone who’s managed to make everyone from a gruff libertarian to a literal demon lovable and who made an entire existential sitcom about what humans owe to each other.

“Every show that I’ve worked on has some set of guiding principles that you could — at least in the moment the show is being made — would have held up under scrutiny as being legitimate causes for hope,” Schur said.

Sure, some series may not hold up as well in retrospect. Schur said the wide-eyed optimism of his Obama-era comedy, “Parks and Recreation,” with its hopeful view of politics and local government, would seem “hopelessly naive” if it were made now: “I mean, you’d be laughed out of Hollywood.”

Still, kindness is the core theme in Schur’s work, and how he’s grown his Hollywood career.

Schur’s Hollywood success started with a stroke of good luck

Schur started in show business in 1998 as a writer on “Saturday Night Live,” an infamously sink-or-swim environment for creative talent. Staying afloat there and landing his first Emmy led to even more opportunities, including the one that would change his career forever: writing on “The Office.”

The privilege of being able to go from one hit show to another isn’t lost on Schur. “It’s not false modesty to say that some of it is just blind luck,” he said. “My first half-hour writing job out here was on ‘The Office,’ and ‘The Office’ became one of the most commercially and creatively successful shows that’s ever existed in Hollywood.”

Getting writing pointers from “The Office” showrunner Greg Daniels proved to be life-changing for growing Schur’s skillset and opening the doors for his next move. When he joined forces with Daniels as cocreators of “Parks and Recreation,” his association with an already successful showrunner cleared many of the traditional barriers to getting noticed.

“The normal process of making your first show is incredibly difficult, and you have to jump over all these hurdles and get incredibly lucky,” Schur said. “Being associated with that show and learning how to write from Greg Daniels meant that I got the enormous benefits out of my very first job that 99.9% of all people who ever become writers just don’t get,” he continued. “I skipped the line.”

It’s one thing to get an opportunity; it’s another to hold on to your success. Though Schur acknowledged that being in the right place at the right time allowed him to operate from a place of “relative comfort and luxury” for most of his career, navigating a notoriously cutthroat industry like Hollywood still requires a level of self-preservation.

Through it all, he’s emerged with a reputation as a nice guy who makes television that’s literally about how people should be nice to each other. If he’s ever felt like his personality was at odds with the pressures of his notoriously competitive industry, he’s not sweating it.

“I think being nice, in general, is a pretty low bar,” Schur said. “If you can’t clear the bar of being a nice person, in whatever industry you’re in, there’s something wrong with you.”

Schur’s management style boils down to being a good person

Being a good showrunner and boss requires making decisions that affect the work life of the entire cast and crew, something Schur learned the hard way during an early season of “Parks and Recreation.”

“I have a very specific origin story in terms of management style,” Schur said. In season two of “Parks and Recreation,” the writing staff was working on an episode that required a lot of props and set designs. A series of rewrites pushed their schedule back until it hit Friday, and everything was still a work in progress. As a result, a producer asked Schur to come in on Sunday and sign off on all the changes.

Schur recalled spending a lovely weekend with his wife and their young son. When he arrived back at the production office Sunday, it was bustling with dozens of people: costumers, props people, set decorators, and production designers.

“This really awful kind of realization swept over me that they had been there all weekend while I had been at the swing set with my kid and having dinner with my wife. They had been working,” Schur recalled.

“I felt this overwhelming sense of shame and embarrassment because the reason they had been there was because I, and the writing staff, had screwed up and hadn’t written a script that was good enough for them to do their work on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday, so they were there on Saturday and Sunday.”

He signed off on everything and went home, where he had a revelation.

“If you really boil it down, my job as a showrunner was to make sure that that never happened again,” he said. “That 50 people did not have to work on the weekend because we had not given them enough time during the workweek to do their job.”

More than a decade later, Schur said putting that idea into practice has made for a happier workplace — one that crew members have enjoyed so much that many are still working with Schur on “A Man on the Inside.”

“I think the reason that that’s true is that the people who work on the shows feel as though their time and lives are treated fairly and respectfully,” Schur said. “So that’s the whole ball of wax for me.”

It’s a startlingly sane way to operate, not that Schur wants any credit for using common sense. When I pressed him again on how he’s able to be so nice and reasonable all the time, he shut it down with his signature modesty.

“I don’t think I deserve any special credit for not being an asshole.”