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Stand Down, Youngs. Old People Are Taking Over TV
'A Man on the Inside,' 'Hacks,' and 'Matlock' are putting older stars like Ted Danson, Kathy Bates, Jean Smart, and more, back in the spotlight
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Ted Danson was 34 when Cheers debuted in the fall of 1982, on the younger side for a TV star at the time. That seasonâs top 10 highest-rated shows included a few other thirtysomething leads in Tom Selleck on Magnum, P.I. and John Ritter in Threeâs Company, but for the most part, the hits of the small screen were built around actors in their fifties (Larry Hagman on Dallas, George Peppard on The A-Team) or sixties (John Forsythe in Dynasty, Jane Wyman in Falcon Crest). By the time Cheers ended a dozen years later, Danson was well into middle age, at a moment when the faces on television were about to get much, much fresher. As advertisers came to believe that the most valuable (and persuadable) audiences to reach were below the age of 35, and as shows with younger, conventionally attractive casts like Friends and Melrose Place became huge hits, the business went full Ponce de LeĂłn, convinced that an on-camera Fountain of Youth would bring with it a flood of new money. Danson didnât stop working during this era, but his two post-Cheers sitcoms, Ink and Becker, were made for CBS, a network with an older audience that kept trying to convince advertisers that people with gray hair had money to spend, too â and even there, Danson was dyeing his own increasingly white locks the brown color he naturally sported in his earlier career.Â
When his latest series, A Man on the Inside, debuted on Netflix, Danson was a few weeks away from turning 77. Where once he had been asked to minimize the signs of his aging, now he was starring in a show where aging is the whole subject matter. Danson plays Charles Nieuwendyk, a former college professor whose life feels completely empty following the death of his wife and his retirement from teaching. He is running out the string, getting up in the morning only because it seems like the thing to do. Itâs only the prodding of his daughter, plus a job offer from a private detective who needs help investigating a jewel theft at a retirement community, that gets him out into the world again. He makes new friends at the retirement home, discovers that lots of people his own age are leading full and complicated lives, and realizes there are more adventures heâd like to have while he still can.Â
Itâs fun, lovely show, and one that feels like a culmination of a trend thatâs been building up over the last decade, where TV has once again learned to embrace and even celebrate older people and the stories they have to tell.Â
Our great senior citizen actors didnât exactly vanish from the small screen during the great Adults 18-34 demographic gold rush. They just generally wound up being supporting players in shows led by less seasoned performers. We still have plenty of those of late, including 82-year-old Harrison Ford in support of Jason Segel on Shrinking. But thereâs been an ever-so-gradual welcoming of older players back to center stage, often at more advanced ages than was the norm even in a less age-conscious era(*). Â
(*) It doesnât always seem that way, because people â famous people, especially â age differently now than they did in mid-to-late 20th century America. Buddy Ebsen was only 65 when he first played Seventies private detective Barnaby Jones, and Jimmy Stewart was only 63 when he got a short-lived, self-titled NBC sitcom around the same time, but both men looked substantially older than Danson and many of the septuagenarian actors weâll be talking about in a moment.   Â
Lily Tomlin and Jane Fonda in Grace and Frankie Saeed Adyani/NetflixThis gradual re-graying started out, ironically, in an area of the business generally held up as forward-thinking and youthful: streaming. In 2015, Netflix debuted Grace and Frankie, in which former co-stars Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin, then in their mid- to late-seventies, played retirees who become close after their husbands leave them to have an affair with each other. It ran for seven seasons â among the longest runs ever for a straight-to-streaming series â and served as a strong reminder that Fonda and Tomlin were just as good a team as theyâd been decades earlier in the feminist film comedy 9 to 5. A few years later, Netflix debuted a male counterpart of sorts in The Kominsky Method, starring Michael Douglas and Alan Arkin as, respectively, a famous acting teacher and his longtime agent and friend; it only ran three seasons, in part because Arkin (who was 84 before the series began) didnât return after the second. Still, the existence of both shows, and the longevity of Grace and Frankie, spoke to an unexpected side effect of the streaming revolution: With no advertisers to appease (at least not in the 2010s), demographics became meaningless. All that mattered were eyeballs, and what drove subscriptions. If someone who had loved Fonda since Barefoot in the Park and Arkin since Catch-22 wanted to sign up for Netflix to watch them, they were a data point, and dollar amount, equivalent to a Stranger Things-obsessed teen.
Soon, other streamers followed. Hacks, on what was then called HBO Max, gave Jean Smart the best role of her career in legendary stand-up comedian Deborah Vance, struggling to stay relevant in her twilight years. Hulu had an acclaimed hit with Only Murders in the Building, a comedy mystery built around the contrast between millennial pop star Selena Gomez and very old pros Steve Martin and Martin Short.Â
The traditional broadcast networks and basic cable channels have also had notable shows with retirement-age leads in that span. Dansonâs Eighties peer Selleck just wrapped up 14 seasons at the helm of CBSâ Blue Bloods. Kathy Bates is starring in a Matlock remake (that isnât exactly a remake), more spry at 76 than Andy Griffith seemed when he first played the role at 59. (Again, we age differently now.) While Succession was an ensemble that often focused on the Roy siblings, the action all spun around what Brian Cox was doing as Logan, a senior whose refusal to cede power to the next generation echoed for plenty of viewers who are not heirs to a media empire. And Jeff Bridges and John Lithgow spent two seasons playing former spies pressed back into active duty in an FX drama literally called The Old Man. The trend has even extended to the world of unscripted TV: Where The Bachelor franchise was designed around watching young hot people look for eternal love, ABC has recently had success with a senior-citizen edition, The Golden Bachelor, while Netflix has its own senior dating show, Later Daters.
And now we have A Man on the Inside, which debuted shortly before Thanksgiving. An absolute gem, it illustrates what fertile ground there is in this phase of life, which can alternately feel precarious and full of possibility. The series, from The Good Place creator Michael Schur, has a lot of fun with how old-fashioned Dansonâs Charles is, and with how some of the other residents have embraced the lack of responsibility of life in a retirement community. But it also finds enormous pathos in the various problems specific to their age, as we see residents dealing with dementia, cancer, or just plain loneliness and a sense of disconnection from a more active life spent elsewhere(*). It gives Danson some of the best and most varied material of his career, and it also takes advantage of the large and underserved collection of actors of a certain age â Sally Struthers from All in the Family, Susan Ruttan from L.A. Law, character actors Stephen McKinley Henderson and John Goetz â who are all clearly eager to show that theyâve still got it.Â
(*) The one area that the series â and these shows about older characters in general â seems wary of is mobility issues. The retirement community not having any prominent residents who use a wheelchair, scooter, walker, or even cane is the elder comedy equivalent of the Friends being able to afford palatial Manhattan apartments while working subsistence jobs in their mid-twenties.Â
That eagerness to prove that advancing years havenât slowed anyoneâs comic timing, nor curbed their ability to make you cry â and that, in fact, some of them have only gotten better at their craft with age â is palpable throughout all of these shows, and many of the others spotlighting older actors in some way. At 82, Ford seems livelier, funnier, and more vulnerable on Shrinking than he has in any film role in a terribly long time. On Matlock, Bates is playing a woman who takes advantage of everyone underestimating her as a non-threatening granny type. Anyone who has seen Bates play Annie Wilkes in Misery would never make the same mistake, but thereâs nonetheless a sly joy to her performance, as she takes pleasure in getting over on the younger people around her. (She has also said this will be her final acting role before retirement, and sheâs clearly giving it her all.) Steve Martin and the other Only Murders writers try to give him at least one big slapstick set piece a season, just as a reminder that the guy who once wrestled with Tomlin for control of the same body in the 1984 comedy All of Me still has some looseness in his joints. Â
Jean Smart crushing it, as she does, on Hacks Jake Giles Netter/MaxEven as streamers have introduced ad-supported tiers, the business hasnât fled back to the safety of stars who donât yet need a daily cholesterol pill. Some of this comes from recent studies that have shown that older Americans have a good amount of disposable income, an eagerness to spend it, and a greater willingness to switch brands than was previously believed. Some is that for viewers below a certain age, television is no longer the automatic default entertainment option; if older viewers are more likely to be the ones watching TV, thereâs some security to giving them stars they already know and love. But many of these shows, like Hacks and Only Murders, also have robust, vocal support from audiences far younger than the main characters. Between prestige-TV fatigue, and the general crumminess of the world at the moment, is it surprising that some viewers who arenât yet of a certain age are gravitating towards comfort-food stories featuring the stars of yesteryear?(*)
(*) Also? Before TV became so demo-conscious, series about older characters often did just fine with younger viewers. In the Eighties, The Golden Girls was worshipped by many kids and teens for whom the idea of retiring to Florida wasnât even a dot on the horizon.
It helps, of course, that these shows are often great. Jean Smart has won a comedy actress Emmy for all three seasons of Hacks so far, and may have a stranglehold on the award until that series ends. Bates has a not-insignificant chance of adding a third Emmy to her mantel for Matlock, and if anyoneâs going to dethrone Jeremy Allen White for comedy lead actor â no less for doing genuinely comedic work (along with some dramatic) â maybe it will be Danson, going to the podium for the first time since the end of Cheers?Â
A Man on the Inside has been renewed for a second season, and the first ended with Charles agreeing to help the detective on a new case, presumably one that will involve going undercover with a new group of fellow seniors. The gleam in Dansonâs eye in that final moment suggested a show, and an actor, with many exciting years left. Thereâs a sense of possibility for him, and for this unlikely but deeply satisfying TV subgenre. Hopefully, we get lots more like it. Â
