One reading of the resurgence of popular philosophy in the secular world is a counter-cultural movement toward the recultivation of philosophical questions. With the advent of Mike Schur’s Netflix series A Man on the Inside (2024), there has again been renewed interest at the cultural level in philosophical themes pertaining to the nature of the good life and the role interpersonal relationships play within it.
A Man on the Inside follows protagonist Charles Nieuwendyk (Ted Danson), a professor emeritus of engineering who, after the recent passing of his wife Victoria from complications related to dementia, is challenged by his daughter Emily (Mary Elizabeth Ellis) to learn to live a meaningful life again. In pursuit of a life after loss, Charles is hired by a private investigator, Julie Kovalenko (Lilah Richcreek Estrada), to become a fake resident in Pacific View Retirement Community. Though hired as a mole (who perceives himself as a spy), Charles begins to form meaningful relationships with the residents, learning that life after loss is possible. The major thesis of the series is captured by Deborah “Didi” Santos Cordero (Stephanie Beatriz), the director of Pacific View: “For the majority of seniors, the biggest threat to their well-being isn’t an accident or health. It’s loneliness.”
Although a first approximation of A Man on the Inside accentuates various unattractive and repellent secular tropes, such as a reference to “toxic masculinity,” profanity, blasphemy, and toleration of liberal sexual ethics, under critical analysis the series offers a powerful and compelling illustration of three enduring truths codified within—and spearheaded by—Catholicism, which are now gaining wider secular interest and attention. While these truths are grounded in and enriched by Catholicism, they are nonetheless grounds for optimism that secular culture, when led by truth and beauty, inches toward Christianity.
The first truth captured in A Man on the Inside is that human beings are rational, social, and interpersonal animals. This truth of human nature grounds the need for both relational and intellectual goods in the pursuit of the good life. This is particularly manifest in Charles’ unsociable life after the death of Victoria. Though a professor emeritus for whom workaholism would be an option, Charles finds himself living an unoccupied, solitary life. For Charles, the goods of the intellectual life are nontransferable: While he literally “wrote the book” on the Golden Gate Bridge, without people his work became sterile, lifeless, and subjectively unimportant. As a compelling illustration, Charles only later, after his experiences at Pacific View, learns to reintegrate his love for teaching back into his life. Another subplot also reveals this truth through Gladys, a resident of Pacific View who later joins “the Neighborhood,” a memory care unit. While Gladys possesses limited cognitive abilities on her slow decline, Charles cares for her with profound sympathy of heart. By the end of the show, when Charles visits Gladys in the Neighborhood, he gives her a stuffed dog, a symbol of comfort that Victoria had given him. Charles’ love for Gladys illustrates the power of love, evidenced especially by care, time, and attention. Relational goods appear among intellectual goods not as rivals but as jointly required in the good life. What Catholicism adds to this thesis is the notion that stamped on our very souls is the imprint of God, who is communal in nature (Gen. 1:27) and made us for relationship with others (Gen. 2:21–22) and himself (Eph. 1:4; 1 John 4:8). Such a relationship is analogous to the marriage union, particularly evidenced in Christ’s institution of the Eucharist (John 6).
Love transcends the boundaries of death and transforms it.
The second truth apprehended by A Man on the Inside is that as social animals, one of the deepest threats to the good life is isolation and loneliness. The antidote is meaningful community and friendship. Didi put the point explicitly in season 1, as mentioned above: “For the majority of seniors, the biggest threat to their well-being isn’t an accident or health. It’s loneliness.” Various iterations of this point are made in the show through different residents. For example, Calbert is visited infrequently by his busy, working son. There is also Florence who, after the passing of her husband, has no family to visit her. In each case, the antidote to their loneliness is friendship. Charles befriends Calbert, and their friendship eventually results in the repair of Calbert and his son’s relationship. (That it had this effect is reminiscent of the medieval philosophers that bonum est diffusivum sui, the good is self-diffusive—or as philosopher Peter Kreeft says, spiritual goods when divided always increase). Although Florence has no family to visit her, her friendship with Virginia suffices to fill her life with joy and adventure. This truth picks up on not only a problem manifest in long-term care and retirement homes, but a broader cultural crisis of depression (clinical and otherwise), chronic loneliness, individualism, and social atomism. Catholicism offers a radical image of the human person’s need for community and friendship, from God’s creation of our social neurophysiology to calling us to friendship with himself (John 15:15).
The third truth held by A Man on the Inside is that love, the greatest relational good of all, is stronger than death—that is, love transcends the boundaries of death and transforms it. Charles’ mention of “mere oblivion” from Shakespeare’s As You Like It at Florence’s eulogy carries explicit atheistic overtones, and its cold reception by the audience is telling, for there is no ultimate hope of reunion, redemption, or reconciliation. However, what is striking is a counter-narrative in A Man on the Inside that contextualizes Florence’s death. Elliott, the husband of Florence’s good friend Virginia, after talking with Didi who lost her mom earlier in life, cuts back on his cigar-smoking so that he can, as it were, buy more time with Virginia, despite wanting to continue living as he desires because of his cancer diagnosis. While Elliott cannot give Virginia more time with Florence, he can love Virginia in such a way that she can have more time with those she loves. What is remarkably illustrated and articulated is the force of death as the end of all—“sans everything,” Shakespeare says—and yet, the only force that does not succumb to the horror and apparent finality of death is love. While this thesis finds explicit source in Song of Solomon 8:6, Catholicism offers a full-blooded justification for this thesis in the person of Jesus Christ, the God who is himself love (1 John 4:8), who conquers death by his Crucifixion and Resurrection.
Recognizing these truths in A Man on the Inside should encourage optimism for Catholics despairing at the secular culture’s seemingly endless moral degeneracy. It should also reify another iteration of a cultural swing toward Catholicism and allow for an opportunity for it to again enrich truths now being reawakened in pop culture.
I conclude with an anecdote about the real, personal, and experiential force of these truths. On a bookshelf in my office at Franciscan University of Steubenville lies a photo of me and my late friend Ray, an elderly man with cerebral palsy who lived in a long-term care home. It was in this care facility I became his social companion, family support worker, and friend. I often turn my students’ attention to this photo and share with them the remarkable story of his life. While I was a young undergraduate student, Ray’s example helped me keep the intellectual life in perspective as an important part of life but which could never fully satisfy the deeply interpersonal, spiritual, and affective needs of human beings. Though his physical disability made tasks extraordinarily difficult and required of him heroic patience, Ray’s life was enriched by his social and communal environment, and it poured over into everything he did. For him, meaningful work was not measured by accolades, success, and comparison, but by care, diligence, and love; meaningful activities were not those that would win audiences and committees, but those that could be appreciated by loved ones; meaningful relationships were not those which were grounded in utilitarian ends, but which fostered lightheartedness, care, and presence.
A Man on the Inside testifies to yet another move of secular culture toward truths already discovered and enriched by Catholicism. It is one more reason to be hopeful that evangelism by both beauty and truth is possible even in this untoward generation (Acts 2:40).