A Man on the Inside season two: Ted Danson and Mary Steenburgen are too cute together

In our heart of hearts, we know that actors are pretending, that they’re not really the characters they play, that they’re probably not even the version of themselves they present in interviews.

But we also love to pretend that there’s a sliver of truth in what we’re watching, looking for connections that may or may not be there.

That’s particularly the case when there’s a leveraging of off-screen relationships to lend a soupcon of authenticity, so that audiences bring their existing investment to a new experience. It’s a shorthand, of sorts.

There’s nothing like casting real-life couples in a project to play onscreen lovers.

It doesn’t always work out well, as Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton knows. Even though the tempestuous pair didn’t break up – for the first time – until almost a decade after the bristly film, it’s now become a part of their public love story.

What we really want to buy into is a real-life story. There are plenty of examples of people seemingly “fall in love” while thrown together on a project, including Annette Bening and Warren Beatty in Bugsy, Penelope Cruz and Javier Bardem in Vicky Christina Barcelona and Rose Leslie and Kit Harington in Game of Thrones.

But more interesting is when they’ve already been together a while. The public has already known them as a unit, and either look for something extra in their chemistry, or arrive all ready to believe them as a couple. We don’t need to spend any time asking ourselves if it feels “real”.

John Krasinski and Emily Blunt was able to throw us into the terrifying deep end immediately in A Quiet Place, because we already understood their bond, and the peril they felt for each other.

One of Hollywood’s most enduring couples who last month celebrated their 30th wedding anniversary are Ted Danson and Mary Steenburgen.

When Netflix announced Steenburgen would join the season two cast of Danson’s comedy series, A Man on the Inside, we all knew that the central delight was going to watch these two bounce off each other.

And, oh boy, they did. It’s the highlight of an otherwise middling season of the detective show, in which Danson plays a retired man who discovers a second calling as a private investigator.

His latest case puts him undercover at a small university to look into who is leaking emails against the unloved boss and sabotaging a lucrative donation from a tech baron alumnus. Steenburgen plays Mona, one of the professors at the school, and she and Danson’s Charles immediately spark.

Appearing together in an appearance on the American breakfast TV program Today, Steenburgen revealed the two “had to unlearn everything about each other and see each other for the first time” to convincingly portray new lovers.

But when you watch them, they have the ease of established lovers who knows all the contours of each other’s personalities – and other things – and who absolutely, as they shared in that interview, had their own codeword to “centre” and connect them right before a scene.

They would say to each other, “Break a leg, Sandy”, referencing Sanford Meisner, a renowned acting teacher, who Steenburgen had worked with.

A Man on the Inside isn’t the first time Danson and Steenburgen worked together. The met while auditioning for the 1983 film Cross Creek, although Danson did not get the part, which they both say was a blessing in disguise.

A decade later, both now divorced, they crossed paths again while filming Pontiac Moon, and things turned amorous after Danson invited Steenburgen on a canoe trip. Bill Clinton gave a speech at their rehearsal dinner.

In the next 10 years, they twice reunited on screen, first in miniseries Gulliver’s Travels, and again in 2004 in It Must Be Love.

Danson played a fictionalised version of himself on Curb Your Enthusiasm, recurring dozens of times over the show’s run, while Steenburgen joined him six times.

One storyline on the show saw their dramatised selves separating, and the line between fiction and reality blurred enough that Steenburgen said they had received loads of texts and messages from friends, worried that it was happening for real.

She’s made appearances on his shows including Becker, Bored to Death and The Good Place, and he was in her series Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist. Every time they pop together, it’s a little burst of delight.

In September, they were jointly awarded the Bob Hope Humanitarian Award at the Emmys for all their philanthropic work. It was the first time the honour was given to a couple, further cementing them as more powerful together than apart.

That’s all the context, the offscreen baggage, the two bring to A Man on the Inside. Sometimes, an actor’s personal life isn’t a boon, but when it’s Danson plus Steenburgen, it can only be a good thing.

Back on the Today show, when asked what was the secret to a successful 30-year marriage, Danson replied, “Mary Steenburgen is my secret”.

Adorable.