Production is underway on season two of the Netflix hit comedy-mystery A Man on the Inside, and it will feature a pair of new co-stars who happen to be Star Trek veterans. Season one, which dropped in November of 2024, stars Ted Danson as Charles Nieuwendyk, a bored retiree who lands a job assisting a private detective attempting to track down a ruby necklace gone missing at a San Francisco retirement home. Season two will find Charles still working at the private detective agency and no doubt serving as the inside man again on a new case.
The actors from the Star Trek universe joining the cast of A Man on the Inside are Linda Park and Jason Mantzoukas. Park was a regular on Star Trek: Enterprise, portraying Ensign Hoshi Sato for all four seasons of the show’s run. Mantzoukas is an actor, comic, and podcaster who provided the voice of the Tellarite character, Jankom Pog, for 39 episodes of the animated series, Star Trek: Prodigy and the video game Star Trek: Prodigy: Supernova.
Park most recently appeared in For All Mankind, Dahmer -- Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story, and Magnum, P.I., and earlier this year joined many of her fellow Trek actors on the annual official cruise. During an excursion, Park posted a photo of herself alongside Star Trek: Strange New Worlds actress Melissa Navia. Mantzoukas counts among his latest projects voiceover gigs for The Simpsons, Velma, Star Wars: Young Jedi Adventures, Lego Marvel Avengers: Mission Demolition, and Krapopolis. He will next be seen in Gabby’s Dollhouse: The Movie, opening in theaters this fall. Mantzoukas also co-hosts the podcast How Did This Get Made? On it, he, Paul Scheer, and June Diane Raphael break down bad movies. Scheer and Raphael are married, and they’re both Trek veterans as well. He voiced Andy Billups and a half-dozen other characters on Lower Decks, while Raphael voiced Queen Paolana, Billups’ mother, in “Where Pleasant Fountains Lie,” a second-season episode.
Returning to A Man on the Inside, the show’s first season also had its share of Star Trek connections. Eugene Cordero, who provided the voice of Sam Rutherford on Star Trek: Lower Decks, recurred as Joel, the husband of Charles’ daughter, while Lower Decks guest voice actor Marc Evan Jackson played a client of the detective agency. Other recurring actors with Trek credits included Clyde Kusatsu, who fans will remember as Admiral Nakamura from the Star Trek: The Next Generation episodes “The Measure of a Man,” “Phantasms,” and “All Good Things…”
Also, dipping deeper into the past, Danson dated Whoopi Goldberg in the 1990s, after they worked together on the big-screen comedy Made in America. Guinan, of course, played Guinan on Star Trek: The Next Generation, in a couple of TNG movies, and on Star Trek: Picard,