How ‘A Man on the Inside’ Pulled Off Its Baseball Scene (and What Had to Get Cut)

Live Feed

The series worked with Major League Baseball to film in San Francisco’s Oracle Park.

Ted Danson as Charles, Stephen McKinley Henderson as Calbert in ‘A Man on the Inside.’

Colleen E. Hayes/Netflix

Logo text

[This story contains some spoilers for Netflix‘s A Man on the Inside, and specifically episode seven, “From Russian Hill With Love.”]

The writers of Netflix’s A Man on the Inside referred to the season’s seventh installment as “the Ferris Bueller episode.”

Charles (Ted Danson), the widower who’s gone undercover inside a San Francisco retirement community to help a private investigator, and his new friend Calbert (Stephen McKinley Henderson) ditch an outing at a local mall to see the city’s sights. Via Calbert’s access to his son’s company car and “the magic of television,” as creator Mike Schur put it, the two friends take a boat tour past Alcatraz, view the Golden Gate Bridge, chat in a redwood forest, take in a view of the Palace of Fine Arts and watch a Giants game at Oracle Park, where they have a heartfelt conversation about their fraught relationships with their adult kids.

It’s a touching scene, and also a big one for Schur, a huge baseball fan who has written about the game (at the late, great Fire Joe Morgan website) and co-hosts a podcast with sportswriter Joe Posnanski that is (often) about baseball.

“Baseball was a big part of it to me,” Schur tells The Hollywood Reporter. “I just thought of Calbert very early as a baseball guy. There was something about the way we talked about him. I was like, this guy loves baseball, and I think it’s partly because we knew Stephen was going to play the part. He’s got a real beautiful stillness to him. He’s a very contemplative person. And I was like, this is not an NFL fan. This is not a college basketball fan. This guy’s a baseball fan. I just saw it in the way we were designing him, and then once the actor signed on, it was like, this is the right thing.”

Before Henderson took the role of Calbert, the show’s writers had envisioned the scene as taking place at a Golden State Warriors game, but “when Stephen signed on, I was like, no, he’s not an NBA guy.” (The NBA team does make its way into the show via Margaret Avery’s character, Florence, who’s a huge fan of the Warriors.)

Working with Major League Baseball, Danson, Henderson and the Man on the Inside crew filmed the scene at Oracle Park in May. They shot most of the dialogue before the gates opened for that day’s game, using about 200 background actors in the right-field stands, then re-filmed parts of it to place them among the 37,000 fans in attendance for a game between Giants and the Cincinnati Reds.

“When we shot the scene where they walk down the concourse and sit down, it was the bottom of the first inning. As they were sitting down, a player on the Giants hit a grand slam and the place went bananas,” Schur recalled. “They saw what had happened, and they were jumping up and down and cheering. We kept yelling at the camera man to shoot the [action on the] field. You could see the guy trotting around the bases, and it was incredible.”

There was just one problem: None of that in any way fit the tone of the scene they had already filmed.

“As soon as it was over, I was like, ‘Oh, we can’t use any of that.’ You can’t show the crowd losing its mind and then cut to a scene where they’re talking very contemplatively and quietly about their kids, without any evidence of what just happened,” Schur said.

The crew also had one other obstacle to work through, Schur said: “It was Hello Kitty bucket hat night, so everyone in the crowd is wearing a Hello Kitty bucket hat, which we had to shoot around to the best of our ability. But I just love baseball stadiums. I find them to be the most beautiful and peaceful places on Earth, and I was very happy that we got to actually shoot in a real one during a real game.”

***

A Man on the Inside is now streaming all episodes on Netflix. Read THR‘s full interview with Ted Danson and Mike Schur.

THR Newsletters