Picture Credits: Getty Images / Netflix / 20th Century TV
David Schwartz seriously knows how to make a show feel light on its feet. The composer is behind Arrested Development, The Good Place, Northern Exposure, and most recently, the Michael Schur-created Netflix series, A Man on the Inside. The comedy about a gentleman sleuth, played by Ted Danson, is pure delight – a sound Schwartz captures with every episode.
Schwartz does what the best comedies manage to do: make it look easy when it’s anything but. “I really enjoy writing comedy, but comedy is hard, as anyone will tell you,” the composer told What’s On Netflix. “The danger is going overboard. My goal is to write a fun piece of music as opposed to a funny piece of music. It’s something I repeat a lot, but when it starts getting funny to me, usually it’s not the right thing for the music to do.”
Recently, the composer took What’s On Netflix behind the scenes of A Man on the Inside and his creative process.
You’re an avid tennis player, so I did want to ask, how does the game influence how you score?
Well, at some point I have to find out how you knew that, which is impressive. But I think it’s the same thing. I think music and tennis, it’s the being in the zone kind of feeling, it’s like, oh, now we’re locked. Now it’s happening. When I’m writing or if I’m performing as a bass player or at any other instrument, I go like, oh, that feeling. And that’s good, obviously. You try to get to that point all the time.
Sometimes, because you’re composing all the time, it’s harder than others. But I like that feeling of improvising. And tennis is that, too. And, of course, composition is not pure improvising. You have to go in many different ways and deal with notes and change things. But usually that first inspiration is what gets me started.
What was the first piece of inspiration you had for season two of A Man on the Inside?
I started doing a lot more spy cues. In my studio here, there’s an upright bass. Mike’s first reaction was, “No, we don’t want an upright bass for this season.” Mike Schur – I have to say, a genius – first sort of rejected that. When I came in and heard how they temped the first episode, it was with a lot of my upright bass cues.
Mike called me and there was a feeling that we wanted season two to be different from season one. At that point I was very happy with season one. It’s not that he was not happy; he wanted it to be less about loss, less about aging, and wanted it to be a little more on the spy side and a little bit more on the fun side. We kept on working toward that, and then they attempted a lot of different stuff. It was constantly changing. I think I found this sound as we went along.
A Man on the Inside. (L to R) Ted Danson as Charles, Mary Steenburgen as Mona in episode 201 of A Man on the Inside. Cr. Colleen E. Hayes/Netflix © 2025
For you, what are the biggest differences between scoring comedy and drama?
In almost everything I’ve done, every show I’ve ever done, it’s always about finding that line between comedy and drama. I mean, there are ones that are either pure comedy or pure drama, but it’s always finding like, have we gone too far? Have we not gone far enough? I might give a few different versions, and that might be, well, this one has a little more comedy in it, or this one is sort of playing against the comedy.
There’s a great scene in season two where Wheeler (David Strathairn) praises teachers, and it’s full of both comedy and drama. It’s very sincere. How do you want music to support a scene like that?
That’s a good question. Let’s go back to tennis. It’s not the tennis equivalent of that, except when you were saying that, I remember there being two tennis coaches on the court. One I knew very well, one who was just playing with a large group, and somebody was giving me very technical advice. Well, I’ll do this — bend your knees and open up. Let’s see a unit turn here and all this stuff. And the other one who knew me well goes like, “He’s a bass player. He goes by feel. He’s not going to take all your technical notes.”
And so I think I watched the scene, I put my hands down. I mean, this sounds very simplistic, and something’s going to move me. It might not be the first riff I play on the piano or a guitar or any instrument. I’m trying to remember the feeling there. I thought that was a really special scene.
It is.
At this point, there were people who didn’t want him to speak, and he didn’t know how well he was liked in the room, and he turned it around at that moment with his observations. It’s a beautiful speech Ted has. And then what everyone else says, complimenting him, it’s just a nice thing of gratitude.
I just try to stay out of the way of something like that because I know they’re going to want it to come from the acting and from everything else. But I think I managed to enhance it by coming up with something I really like — things where I can bring beauty and themes that come around. And there’s a lot of that in the show too.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uE-TrWspLHY
It’s a feel-good show, too. Any instruments, in your experience, just give a sense of lightness to an audience?
No. I mean, I am sure there are, but I’d like to think I could get it out of a variety of different instruments. And sometimes it changes while we’re doing it. The feeling of good and the philosophy part of it started back in The Good Place, which is the first thing I did with Mike and [producer] David Miner. They’re extraordinary people.
How does a first meeting like that usually go? What do you try to communicate about music?
It’s funny, I went to a meeting with them, but you’re sitting — for some reason — they give the one person, the composer, the big couch. I mean, you know how you could take a chair, but it seems that they want you to bear it. I’m in this big couch and there’s five to seven producers, and I have one goal: to remember one or two people’s names, that’s it, and try to speak coherently.
Good goal.
But they were only asking me questions about Deadwood, which I thought was really interesting. They wanted David Milch stories, and I didn’t last that long on Deadwood, but I had one good Milch story and they really liked that. And that’s sort of the end of the meeting. And Mike said, “Well, I’m not so into music in my shows.” I said, “Okay.” [Laughs]
[Laughs] How’d that change happen?
It really changed in The Good Place. We had a lot of music. But I guess the point I was trying to get to is that the idea of being [feel] good certainly came from The Good Place, and that’s where we started doing that.
The last couple of shows I’d done before that were Arrested Development and Lady Dynamite, which were about irreverence and just a kitchen sink of music and trying everything. Believe me, I love those shows. I’m very proud of them and the people who did them. That’s really great.
But on this, we had a palette. There’s a lot of pianos in this show. There’s a lot of guitar, but very subtle. There are occasional ukuleles and mandolins. There’s my different basses — the electric bass, the Höfner Beatle bass — and that’s the palette I start out with. Sometimes there are little bits of brass or strings coming in, and I don’t want it to sound like a giant fake orchestra. So I try to stay subtle with that.
Was Mike totally joking or was it a case of a certain type of music he doesn’t like in his shows?
I think at that point he had done The Office and Parks and Recreation, and they didn’t really have a lot of underscore, very little. They had great themes. So, I think it was coming from that, and maybe a lot of writers go like, “Oh, I have dialogue here. Why is there music playing?” Or just the conceit that there’s music playing at all, like, why is there suddenly music playing in the middle of the scene? But I think he really learned to use it as well as anybody. He’s a master at it.
And he sort of said, “Oh, I know nothing about music.” He’s extremely musical and has a tremendous musical depth and listens to classical music and knows a tremendous amount about every decade of pop music. He says he hates jazz, but he’s really used it quite well too.
What does a note look like from Mike?
It really varies. He might refer back to something I wrote for The Good Place, and it might be in the temp. “Can you make it more like that?” It’s often about timing. We might have spotted at the start of this second, but he may have found a better second five seconds later or two seconds before.
This is something I can’t stress enough for myself, but coming from him, it has more gravitas to it: it’s about the story. So if I get caught in some really cool melody and I’ll add this groove here, and then I’ll listen back and I go, “Well, did we make the story better or did we just get in the way of it?” I think that’s what it is. It doesn’t matter what you’re doing on a TV show or a film — you’re trying to move the story forward in a way that’s going to be effective.
For A Man on the Inside, the score sounds like music Charles would listen to. Do you try to make music that fits a character’s taste?
That’s a great question because it’s something I always try to do. It didn’t really become a big thing, but in the first season I wanted the clarinet. The first season originally opens up with a three-minute score that I’m still missing, but they put a great Cat Stevens song there. It was the right decision to do the Cat Stevens song.
From this three-minute score, I could take different themes out of it. It’s not really the way we worked on the show. Very often in a place where you might repeat a theme, we don’t – we come up with another one. Even if it’s like that scene in the bar where they’re all praising each other, there might be other scenes that have that same feeling. We could use an emotional piano, but we tend to just write new ones for those. It works.
There’s a great video of you playing some of the Arrested Development score in a studio. You and the other players are just connecting. What’s a day in the studio where you really enjoy learning the nuances of another player and just responding to them?
When I do a record session on my daughter’s record or anybody’s record or a writing session, even when we wrote the song — you tend to come in and you talk for an hour, which I love. With scoring sessions, with the session players, they want to get going because they’ve got the next one coming up in three hours. I believe we love each other, so we can joke. There’s a great sense of humor. I mean, every musician that I know has a great sense of humor, and they can do comedy. So being in those days is really great, getting to actually play.
I love to play with a rhythm section, and that brings me joy. Rarely do we have, oh, here’s a five-minute groove. It just doesn’t happen in the kind of music I do, but it has happened. It is joyous and we find things.
I guess there are days that are frustrating where we’re not thinking the same way, and then we have… The people I use are usually great enough to say, “Okay, well let’s drop this idea and try this idea.” I give a lot of ideas while we’re doing it, and I try to always come from, “That’s great, but what if?” Because if you say, “That doesn’t work,” that sort of ends the session right there.
Are you aware of the fan theories connecting The Good Place and A Man on the Inside?
No, tell me.
Okay. There are theories that A Man on the Inside and The Good Place are in the same universe, and not only that, Charles is one of the lives Michael lives on Earth.
Oh, I like that. That gives me chills. I like that a lot. No, I hadn’t heard any of this. What else have you got?
That was the main one. There’s other easter eggs on the campus, though, right?
Well, there are a lot of little nuggets that you have to pick up on. A friend of mine watched it, and I didn’t even know this, but he noticed that the music school at Wheeler College is called Oats Hall. I’m sure Mike put it in there. It’s too obvious when you know it, but it’s the Hall & Oates joke. But anyway, I like that one. That’s a good theory.
