Ted Danson’s Netflix Role Has Fans Convinced It’s a Secret ‘Good Place’ Spinoff
Fans believe Ted's new character is secretly Michael living as a human—and the clues are compelling
It doesn’t take a detective to know that Ted Danson and Michael Schur are extremely close. After all, they’ve worked on two groundbreaking TV shows—The Good Place and A Man on the Inside—together. What does need a little investing, though, is the popular fan theory about A Man on the Inside being a spin-off of The Good Place. Below, we share why people on the internet believe that to be true and if Danson and Schur have commented on the rumors.
Is ‘A Man on the Inside’ a spinoff of ‘The Good Place’?
After A Man on the Inside debuted on Netflix in the fall of 2024, viewers found themselves wondering: is it a spinoff of The Good Place? For context, at the end of that show, which Schur created, Danson’s character Michael decides he wants to stop being an architect in the afterlife and instead become a human. Because of that, people began to wonder if Danson’s character Charles in A Man on the Inside, also created by Schur, was simply Michael enjoying his human life.
“It helps that there are a number of Good Place actors that make appearances,” one Reddit user said.
Others suggest that while they love both shows, their preference is that they remain in separate universes.
“I prefer them as separate entities because Charles, to me, is a different character than Michael and, if all of his past life was just a product of a mind wipe, that would be a lot less meaningful to me especially since the show is about aging,” another Reddit user said. “Not saying other people can’t view it that way, I just prefer to separate them in my head.”
Ted Danson and Michael Schur’s thoughts on the fan theories
As of publication, neither Danson or Schur have commented on if the fan theory is true or not. They have, however, opened up about how much they love working together.
“That would be pretty much my truth. I wouldn’t admit it around serious actors, but I would do pretty much any —no, I would do anything for Mike Schur. I truly mean that. I appreciate who he is and how he goes through life, and I appreciate him as a writer,” Danson told The Hollywood Reporter in November of 2024. “Morgan Sackett, his producing partner, called me and said they want to talk to me about this. We had lunch and I went home and watched the documentary, The Mole Agent, with my wife, Mary [Steenburgen], and we just fell in love with it. But I was on board no matter what.”
In that same interview, Schur added onto that by saying, “I told Netflix, ‘I’ll do this forever if you want to keep paying me to write seasons of a show where Ted Danson is an undercover detective. I will sign up for this through 2050 if you let me.’”
“We pitched it to them as a series, not a limited thing,” he continued. “But before the [first’ season was even over, we had started saying [a second season] could be this, could be this, and trying to figure out how it would be different and how it would be the same. He can’t go undercover at Pacific View anymore. Obviously, that ship has sailed. But what you have at the end of the season is a 76-year-old man with a new lease on life and a new sense of purpose and a new kind of fledgling career as an undercover detective. You have a lot of building blocks for future seasons.”
Conversation
All comments are subject to our Community Guidelines. Woman's World does not endorse the opinions and views shared by our readers in our comment sections. Our comments section is a place where readers can engage in healthy, productive, lively, and respectful discussions. Offensive language, hate speech, personal attacks, and/or defamatory statements are not permitted. Advertising or spam is also prohibited.
