Joining me for the first live taping of my Deadline video series The Actor’s Side is 18-time Emmy nominee and three-time winner Ted Danson, whose latest hit series, A Man on the Inside, has been renewed for a second season by Netflix. The series was an AFI honoree for TV Program of the Year, and Danson has received Golden Globe, SAG, and Critics Choice nominations for it. Additionally he was the recipient of the Carol Burnett Award at the 2025 Golden Globes.
Danson came to The Actor’s Side taping straight from the set where he is now working with wife Mary Steenburgen as his love interest in Season 2 of the show, which still has him solving crimes, this time on a college campus. We shot the episode in front of a packed audience at Netflix’s Hollywood headquarters, and Danson talks about everything — and I mean everything — in a remarkable career that has seen him set a record for an actor for being a series regular in 12 different shows, a feat matched by no other.
Danson tells stories of Cheers (and the one reason it wasn’t canceled after its first season), Becker, The Good Place, CSI, Curb Your Enthusiasm and his first gig in the soap opera Somerset, which almost ended his career before it started due to a severe panic attack that had him sweating all over his co-stars. He also talks about learning to play bagpipes for his first film, 1978’s The Onion Field, working with his idol Jack Lemmon in Dad, Macaulay Culkin as his son in Getting Even With Dad, the huge success of Three Men and a Baby and so much more. Topics also include the life-changing advice he got from a superstar which has set him on a new path as the 77-year-old looks to the future and aging with purpose. That is in fact a theme of A Man on the Inside, in which he takes on a job as an undercover mole in an assisted living home where a petty crime has taken place. The series is based on the Oscar-nominated Chilean documentary The Mole Agent, but Danson and an exceptional cast take it to new places. He also tells me about Where Everybody Knows Your Name, the new podcast he does with Cheers buddy Woody Harrelson.
Watch on Deadline
To watch our special conversation in front of a live audience, and to get the “actor’s side” of things from Ted Danson, watch the video above.
And also, join me every Wednesday during Emmy season for a new episode of The Actor’s Side in its regular slot.