‘A Man on the Inside’ Thanksgiving episode meditates on mothers, loss

Mike Schur bemoans the loss of holiday episodes on television.

“The new world of TV shows not following a September to late May schedule means that we don’t get Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, Valentine’s Day, sometimes St. Patrick’s Day,” the creator says. “I really miss that. It’s such a staple of my youth and also most of the shows I worked on pre-2015 or whatever.”

So for the second season of his Netflix comedy “A Man on the Inside,” now streaming, Schur, best known for “Parks and Recreation” and “The Good Place,” orchestrated a madcap Thanksgiving episode that eventually becomes a moving meditation on how women connect to their mothers.

In the half-hour fifth episode, titled “Thanksgiving Break,” the show’s budding, elderly private investigator Charles Nieuwendyk (Ted Danson) hosts the traditional dinner at his home with his new girlfriend Mona (Mary Steenburgen, Danson’s real-life wife). Charles’ adult daughter, Emily (Mary Elizabeth Ellis) has spent hours fretting over whether she should bake a pecan pie her late mother used to make, worried that if she does so, it will make her father even sadder about the loss, especially at a time when he’s building a new relationship. Meanwhile, Mona invites Charles’ boss, Julie (Lilah Richcreek Estrada), who is celebrating with her mother, Vanessa (Constance Marie), a former con artist who went to jail when Julie was a young girl, leading to their strained relationship.

The plot breaks from the season’s arc that involves Charles investigating a mystery at a local college, and instead allows Schur and his team to dig deeper into the character revelations that arise from the festivities.

“Thanksgiving is, traditionally, I think, the time of highest-stress, most intense sort of family dynamics,” Schur says.

During the “giving thanks” portion of the evening, when everyone gathers around the dinner table, a showdown takes place between Julie and Vanessa, where the former forces the latter to admit to the group her past of wrongdoing. But the episode really culminates in a tender scene between Julie and Emily, where they commiserate over their different forms of grief. The taciturn Julie is quick to note how different their circumstances are, but Emily gives her some hard-earned wisdom in return. “You only get one mom,” Emily tells Julie. “And I miss mine every day. So if there’s a one in a billion chance that you can repair your relationship with her, I think you should take it.”

Julie seems to hear her, and texts her mom, “I’m sorry,” and “I love you.”

“It’s just two adult women with two very different moms at two very different moments in their lives,” Schur says. “And Thanksgiving is the kind of event that makes you reflect and makes you think about relationships with your family.”

Ellis explains that the episode made the cast weep during the table read.

“To be able to be like, yay, things are funny and rolling along and laughing and then all of a sudden it’s like, we’re humans and we lose people and our relationships break, and the beautiful part about life is repair,” says Ellis in a phone call earlier this month.

Throughout the first season of “A Man on the Inside,” in which Charles went undercover at a retirement community, Julie’s personal life was kept intentionally quiet so she could be a deadpan foil to the hero. Estrada was thrilled when Schur told her that upcoming episodes would explore her back story.

“I love that you get to just see now why Julie is the way she is,” she says. “She does not have it all together. She’s messy and she’s human and I just think that makes her so much more relatable.”

In Julie’s scene opposite Emily, Estrada was careful to make the audience recognize the deep hurt that the typically tough-as-nails Julie carries.

“I just wanted to make sure that the audience saw her vulnerability because she couldn’t hide it anymore,” Estrada says. “And just really got to see that little girl that never healed from that incident and is trying to move past it.”

Vanessa, played by Constance Marie, went to prison when Julie was young. “I just wanted to make sure that the audience saw her vulnerability because she couldn’t hide it anymore,” says Lilah Richcreek Estrada, who plays Julie.

(Colleen E. Hayes / Netflix)

The addition of the motherhood plotline also coincided with a milestone in Estrada’s life. When she started shooting the season, she was five and a half weeks postpartum. The experience of being a new mom, and considering how her actions will affect her son, threw the storyline into relief.

“Now to have the idea that the things I do will shape them and have more of a visceral feeling of that and just thinking of my own mom and how everybody is always doing their best and you can do your best and still your child will have wounds,” she says.

Her own newfound understanding of maternal responsibilities also gave her more empathy for Vanessa’s character, even though she had to play Julie’s initial coldness to her mom.

Ellis, meanwhile, has a nearly 14-year-old son who is in what she calls a “teenage, hormonal place” — not that dissimilar to Emily, who has three slacker teenagers obsessed with video games. For Ellis, the exchange between Julie and Emily aligns with her own ideas about parenting.

“As a mother, a big part of my parenting philosophy is I’m not perfect, I’ve never been a mom before, I don’t know what I’m doing, so I’m going to mess up,” she says. “But I can ask for your forgiveness and you’re only a kid and you’re going to do stupid stuff and you get to ask for my forgiveness and we get to practice this generosity of forgiving each other.”

Schur says that he and the writers designed the whole episode as a “collision course” that would put Julie and Emily in conversation. That did not mean giving up the ridiculousness of the comedy. After all, Vanessa’s boyfriend, played by the always absurd Jason Mantzoukas, brings his very ill guinea pig to the festivities.

Jason Mantzoukas, left, who plays Vanessa’s boyfriend Apollo, with Michael Schur, the creator of “A Man on the Inside,” on the set of the show.

(Colleen E. Hayes / Netflix)

Sneaking that kind of thoughtful material into sitcoms is what Schur does best, Ellis says.

“That’s a thing that Mike Schur does so well in his shows is take these really big existential ideas and turn them into personal experiences between the characters that open these opportunities to watch them together with their families and then have hopefully conversations about them that make us all a little better and a little closer,” she explains.

Thanksgiving, naturally, is the perfect time for those discussions. And, along the way, Schur and the cast are reviving a time-honored television tradition.

“This would be like a water-cooler episode back in the day,” Ellis says. “Where like people would be gone for Thanksgiving and then they’d watch this and come back together and talk about it at work.”

Mike Schur bemoans the loss of holiday episodes on television.

“The new world of TV shows not following a September to late May schedule means that we don’t get Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, Valentine’s Day, sometimes St. Patrick’s Day,” the creator says. “I really miss that. It’s such a staple of my youth and also most of the shows I worked on pre-2015 or whatever.”

So for the second season of his Netflix comedy “A Man on the Inside,” now streaming, Schur, best known for “Parks and Recreation” and “The Good Place,” orchestrated a madcap Thanksgiving episode that eventually becomes a moving meditation on how women connect to their mothers.

In the half-hour fifth episode, titled “Thanksgiving Break,” the show’s budding, elderly private investigator Charles Nieuwendyk (Ted Danson) hosts the traditional dinner at his home with his new girlfriend Mona (Mary Steenburgen, Danson’s real-life wife). Charles’ adult daughter, Emily (Mary Elizabeth Ellis) has spent hours fretting over whether she should bake a pecan pie her late mother used to make, worried that if she does so, it will make her father even sadder about the loss, especially at a time when he’s building a new relationship. Meanwhile, Mona invites Charles’ boss, Julie (Lilah Richcreek Estrada), who is celebrating with her mother, Vanessa (Constance Marie), a former con artist who went to jail when Julie was a young girl, leading to their strained relationship.

The plot breaks from the season’s arc that involves Charles investigating a mystery at a local college, and instead allows Schur and his team to dig deeper into the character revelations that arise from the festivities.

“Thanksgiving is, traditionally, I think, the time of highest-stress, most intense sort of family dynamics,” Schur says.

During the “giving thanks” portion of the evening, when everyone gathers around the dinner table, a showdown takes place between Julie and Vanessa, where the former forces the latter to admit to the group her past of wrongdoing. But the episode really culminates in a tender scene between Julie and Emily, where they commiserate over their different forms of grief. The taciturn Julie is quick to note how different their circumstances are, but Emily gives her some hard-earned wisdom in return. “You only get one mom,” Emily tells Julie. “And I miss mine every day. So if there’s a one in a billion chance that you can repair your relationship with her, I think you should take it.”

Julie seems to hear her, and texts her mom, “I’m sorry,” and “I love you.”

“It’s just two adult women with two very different moms at two very different moments in their lives,” Schur says. “And Thanksgiving is the kind of event that makes you reflect and makes you think about relationships with your family.”

Ellis explains that the episode made the cast weep during the table read.

“To be able to be like, yay, things are funny and rolling along and laughing and then all of a sudden it’s like, we’re humans and we lose people and our relationships break, and the beautiful part about life is repair,” says Ellis in a phone call earlier this month.

Throughout the first season of “A Man on the Inside,” in which Charles went undercover at a retirement community, Julie’s personal life was kept intentionally quiet so she could be a deadpan foil to the hero. Estrada was thrilled when Schur told her that upcoming episodes would explore her back story.

“I love that you get to just see now why Julie is the way she is,” she says. “She does not have it all together. She’s messy and she’s human and I just think that makes her so much more relatable.”

In Julie’s scene opposite Emily, Estrada was careful to make the audience recognize the deep hurt that the typically tough-as-nails Julie carries.

“I just wanted to make sure that the audience saw her vulnerability because she couldn’t hide it anymore,” Estrada says. “And just really got to see that little girl that never healed from that incident and is trying to move past it.”

Vanessa, played by Constance Marie, went to prison when Julie was young. “I just wanted to make sure that the audience saw her vulnerability because she couldn’t hide it anymore,” says Lilah Richcreek Estrada, who plays Julie.

(Colleen E. Hayes / Netflix)

The addition of the motherhood plotline also coincided with a milestone in Estrada’s life. When she started shooting the season, she was five and a half weeks postpartum. The experience of being a new mom, and considering how her actions will affect her son, threw the storyline into relief.

“Now to have the idea that the things I do will shape them and have more of a visceral feeling of that and just thinking of my own mom and how everybody is always doing their best and you can do your best and still your child will have wounds,” she says.

Her own newfound understanding of maternal responsibilities also gave her more empathy for Vanessa’s character, even though she had to play Julie’s initial coldness to her mom.

Ellis, meanwhile, has a nearly 14-year-old son who is in what she calls a “teenage, hormonal place” — not that dissimilar to Emily, who has three slacker teenagers obsessed with video games. For Ellis, the exchange between Julie and Emily aligns with her own ideas about parenting.

“As a mother, a big part of my parenting philosophy is I’m not perfect, I’ve never been a mom before, I don’t know what I’m doing, so I’m going to mess up,” she says. “But I can ask for your forgiveness and you’re only a kid and you’re going to do stupid stuff and you get to ask for my forgiveness and we get to practice this generosity of forgiving each other.”

Schur says that he and the writers designed the whole episode as a “collision course” that would put Julie and Emily in conversation. That did not mean giving up the ridiculousness of the comedy. After all, Vanessa’s boyfriend, played by the always absurd Jason Mantzoukas, brings his very ill guinea pig to the festivities.

Jason Mantzoukas, left, who plays Vanessa’s boyfriend Apollo, with Michael Schur, the creator of “A Man on the Inside,” on the set of the show.

(Colleen E. Hayes / Netflix)

Sneaking that kind of thoughtful material into sitcoms is what Schur does best, Ellis says.

“That’s a thing that Mike Schur does so well in his shows is take these really big existential ideas and turn them into personal experiences between the characters that open these opportunities to watch them together with their families and then have hopefully conversations about them that make us all a little better and a little closer,” she explains.

Thanksgiving, naturally, is the perfect time for those discussions. And, along the way, Schur and the cast are reviving a time-honored television tradition.

“This would be like a water-cooler episode back in the day,” Ellis says. “Where like people would be gone for Thanksgiving and then they’d watch this and come back together and talk about it at work.”

Mike Schur bemoans the loss of holiday episodes on television.

“The new world of TV shows not following a September to late May schedule means that we don’t get Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, Valentine’s Day, sometimes St. Patrick’s Day,” the creator says. “I really miss that. It’s such a staple of my youth and also most of the shows I worked on pre-2015 or whatever.”

So for the second season of his Netflix comedy “A Man on the Inside,” now streaming, Schur, best known for “Parks and Recreation” and “The Good Place,” orchestrated a madcap Thanksgiving episode that eventually becomes a moving meditation on how women connect to their mothers.

In the half-hour fifth episode, titled “Thanksgiving Break,” the show’s budding, elderly private investigator Charles Nieuwendyk (Ted Danson) hosts the traditional dinner at his home with his new girlfriend Mona (Mary Steenburgen, Danson’s real-life wife). Charles’ adult daughter, Emily (Mary Elizabeth Ellis) has spent hours fretting over whether she should bake a pecan pie her late mother used to make, worried that if she does so, it will make her father even sadder about the loss, especially at a time when he’s building a new relationship. Meanwhile, Mona invites Charles’ boss, Julie (Lilah Richcreek Estrada), who is celebrating with her mother, Vanessa (Constance Marie), a former con artist who went to jail when Julie was a young girl, leading to their strained relationship.

The plot breaks from the season’s arc that involves Charles investigating a mystery at a local college, and instead allows Schur and his team to dig deeper into the character revelations that arise from the festivities.

“Thanksgiving is, traditionally, I think, the time of highest-stress, most intense sort of family dynamics,” Schur says.

During the “giving thanks” portion of the evening, when everyone gathers around the dinner table, a showdown takes place between Julie and Vanessa, where the former forces the latter to admit to the group her past of wrongdoing. But the episode really culminates in a tender scene between Julie and Emily, where they commiserate over their different forms of grief. The taciturn Julie is quick to note how different their circumstances are, but Emily gives her some hard-earned wisdom in return. “You only get one mom,” Emily tells Julie. “And I miss mine every day. So if there’s a one in a billion chance that you can repair your relationship with her, I think you should take it.”

Julie seems to hear her, and texts her mom, “I’m sorry,” and “I love you.”

“It’s just two adult women with two very different moms at two very different moments in their lives,” Schur says. “And Thanksgiving is the kind of event that makes you reflect and makes you think about relationships with your family.”

Ellis explains that the episode made the cast weep during the table read.

“To be able to be like, yay, things are funny and rolling along and laughing and then all of a sudden it’s like, we’re humans and we lose people and our relationships break, and the beautiful part about life is repair,” says Ellis in a phone call earlier this month.

Throughout the first season of “A Man on the Inside,” in which Charles went undercover at a retirement community, Julie’s personal life was kept intentionally quiet so she could be a deadpan foil to the hero. Estrada was thrilled when Schur told her that upcoming episodes would explore her back story.

“I love that you get to just see now why Julie is the way she is,” she says. “She does not have it all together. She’s messy and she’s human and I just think that makes her so much more relatable.”

In Julie’s scene opposite Emily, Estrada was careful to make the audience recognize the deep hurt that the typically tough-as-nails Julie carries.

“I just wanted to make sure that the audience saw her vulnerability because she couldn’t hide it anymore,” Estrada says. “And just really got to see that little girl that never healed from that incident and is trying to move past it.”

Vanessa, played by Constance Marie, went to prison when Julie was young. “I just wanted to make sure that the audience saw her vulnerability because she couldn’t hide it anymore,” says Lilah Richcreek Estrada, who plays Julie.

(Colleen E. Hayes / Netflix)

The addition of the motherhood plotline also coincided with a milestone in Estrada’s life. When she started shooting the season, she was five and a half weeks postpartum. The experience of being a new mom, and considering how her actions will affect her son, threw the storyline into relief.

“Now to have the idea that the things I do will shape them and have more of a visceral feeling of that and just thinking of my own mom and how everybody is always doing their best and you can do your best and still your child will have wounds,” she says.

Her own newfound understanding of maternal responsibilities also gave her more empathy for Vanessa’s character, even though she had to play Julie’s initial coldness to her mom.

Ellis, meanwhile, has a nearly 14-year-old son who is in what she calls a “teenage, hormonal place” — not that dissimilar to Emily, who has three slacker teenagers obsessed with video games. For Ellis, the exchange between Julie and Emily aligns with her own ideas about parenting.

“As a mother, a big part of my parenting philosophy is I’m not perfect, I’ve never been a mom before, I don’t know what I’m doing, so I’m going to mess up,” she says. “But I can ask for your forgiveness and you’re only a kid and you’re going to do stupid stuff and you get to ask for my forgiveness and we get to practice this generosity of forgiving each other.”

Schur says that he and the writers designed the whole episode as a “collision course” that would put Julie and Emily in conversation. That did not mean giving up the ridiculousness of the comedy. After all, Vanessa’s boyfriend, played by the always absurd Jason Mantzoukas, brings his very ill guinea pig to the festivities.

Jason Mantzoukas, left, who plays Vanessa’s boyfriend Apollo, with Michael Schur, the creator of “A Man on the Inside,” on the set of the show.

(Colleen E. Hayes / Netflix)

Sneaking that kind of thoughtful material into sitcoms is what Schur does best, Ellis says.

“That’s a thing that Mike Schur does so well in his shows is take these really big existential ideas and turn them into personal experiences between the characters that open these opportunities to watch them together with their families and then have hopefully conversations about them that make us all a little better and a little closer,” she explains.

Thanksgiving, naturally, is the perfect time for those discussions. And, along the way, Schur and the cast are reviving a time-honored television tradition.

“This would be like a water-cooler episode back in the day,” Ellis says. “Where like people would be gone for Thanksgiving and then they’d watch this and come back together and talk about it at work.”

Mike Schur bemoans the loss of holiday episodes on television.

“The new world of TV shows not following a September to late May schedule means that we don’t get Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, Valentine’s Day, sometimes St. Patrick’s Day,” the creator says. “I really miss that. It’s such a staple of my youth and also most of the shows I worked on pre-2015 or whatever.”

So for the second season of his Netflix comedy “A Man on the Inside,” now streaming, Schur, best known for “Parks and Recreation” and “The Good Place,” orchestrated a madcap Thanksgiving episode that eventually becomes a moving meditation on how women connect to their mothers.

In the half-hour fifth episode, titled “Thanksgiving Break,” the show’s budding, elderly private investigator Charles Nieuwendyk (Ted Danson) hosts the traditional dinner at his home with his new girlfriend Mona (Mary Steenburgen, Danson’s real-life wife). Charles’ adult daughter, Emily (Mary Elizabeth Ellis) has spent hours fretting over whether she should bake a pecan pie her late mother used to make, worried that if she does so, it will make her father even sadder about the loss, especially at a time when he’s building a new relationship. Meanwhile, Mona invites Charles’ boss, Julie (Lilah Richcreek Estrada), who is celebrating with her mother, Vanessa (Constance Marie), a former con artist who went to jail when Julie was a young girl, leading to their strained relationship.

The plot breaks from the season’s arc that involves Charles investigating a mystery at a local college, and instead allows Schur and his team to dig deeper into the character revelations that arise from the festivities.

“Thanksgiving is, traditionally, I think, the time of highest-stress, most intense sort of family dynamics,” Schur says.

During the “giving thanks” portion of the evening, when everyone gathers around the dinner table, a showdown takes place between Julie and Vanessa, where the former forces the latter to admit to the group her past of wrongdoing. But the episode really culminates in a tender scene between Julie and Emily, where they commiserate over their different forms of grief. The taciturn Julie is quick to note how different their circumstances are, but Emily gives her some hard-earned wisdom in return. “You only get one mom,” Emily tells Julie. “And I miss mine every day. So if there’s a one in a billion chance that you can repair your relationship with her, I think you should take it.”

Julie seems to hear her, and texts her mom, “I’m sorry,” and “I love you.”

“It’s just two adult women with two very different moms at two very different moments in their lives,” Schur says. “And Thanksgiving is the kind of event that makes you reflect and makes you think about relationships with your family.”

Ellis explains that the episode made the cast weep during the table read.

“To be able to be like, yay, things are funny and rolling along and laughing and then all of a sudden it’s like, we’re humans and we lose people and our relationships break, and the beautiful part about life is repair,” says Ellis in a phone call earlier this month.

Throughout the first season of “A Man on the Inside,” in which Charles went undercover at a retirement community, Julie’s personal life was kept intentionally quiet so she could be a deadpan foil to the hero. Estrada was thrilled when Schur told her that upcoming episodes would explore her back story.

“I love that you get to just see now why Julie is the way she is,” she says. “She does not have it all together. She’s messy and she’s human and I just think that makes her so much more relatable.”

In Julie’s scene opposite Emily, Estrada was careful to make the audience recognize the deep hurt that the typically tough-as-nails Julie carries.

“I just wanted to make sure that the audience saw her vulnerability because she couldn’t hide it anymore,” Estrada says. “And just really got to see that little girl that never healed from that incident and is trying to move past it.”

Vanessa, played by Constance Marie, went to prison when Julie was young. “I just wanted to make sure that the audience saw her vulnerability because she couldn’t hide it anymore,” says Lilah Richcreek Estrada, who plays Julie.

(Colleen E. Hayes / Netflix)

The addition of the motherhood plotline also coincided with a milestone in Estrada’s life. When she started shooting the season, she was five and a half weeks postpartum. The experience of being a new mom, and considering how her actions will affect her son, threw the storyline into relief.

“Now to have the idea that the things I do will shape them and have more of a visceral feeling of that and just thinking of my own mom and how everybody is always doing their best and you can do your best and still your child will have wounds,” she says.

Her own newfound understanding of maternal responsibilities also gave her more empathy for Vanessa’s character, even though she had to play Julie’s initial coldness to her mom.

Ellis, meanwhile, has a nearly 14-year-old son who is in what she calls a “teenage, hormonal place” — not that dissimilar to Emily, who has three slacker teenagers obsessed with video games. For Ellis, the exchange between Julie and Emily aligns with her own ideas about parenting.

“As a mother, a big part of my parenting philosophy is I’m not perfect, I’ve never been a mom before, I don’t know what I’m doing, so I’m going to mess up,” she says. “But I can ask for your forgiveness and you’re only a kid and you’re going to do stupid stuff and you get to ask for my forgiveness and we get to practice this generosity of forgiving each other.”

Schur says that he and the writers designed the whole episode as a “collision course” that would put Julie and Emily in conversation. That did not mean giving up the ridiculousness of the comedy. After all, Vanessa’s boyfriend, played by the always absurd Jason Mantzoukas, brings his very ill guinea pig to the festivities.

Jason Mantzoukas, left, who plays Vanessa’s boyfriend Apollo, with Michael Schur, the creator of “A Man on the Inside,” on the set of the show.

(Colleen E. Hayes / Netflix)

Sneaking that kind of thoughtful material into sitcoms is what Schur does best, Ellis says.

“That’s a thing that Mike Schur does so well in his shows is take these really big existential ideas and turn them into personal experiences between the characters that open these opportunities to watch them together with their families and then have hopefully conversations about them that make us all a little better and a little closer,” she explains.

Thanksgiving, naturally, is the perfect time for those discussions. And, along the way, Schur and the cast are reviving a time-honored television tradition.

“This would be like a water-cooler episode back in the day,” Ellis says. “Where like people would be gone for Thanksgiving and then they’d watch this and come back together and talk about it at work.”