By Joshua Tyler
| Published
The American college system is in crisis. According to recent research published by the Federal Reserve Bank, attending college no longer provides graduates with an advantage in finding a job. College doesn’t work anymore, and people are starting to figure it out.
Into that environment arrives season 2 of the hit Netflix series A Man On The Inside. What started out as a show about elderly people in a nursing home has now been transformed into a brainwashing tool designed to trick young people into giving colleges their money, no matter if going there helps them or not.
If you watched season 2 of A Man On The Inside, whether you realized it or not, you were being screenwashed. Here’s how they did it.
screenwashed (adjective) — When something seen on a screen completely changes how someone thinks or feels, as if their old beliefs were erased and replaced by what they just saw.
A Crazy Person Speaks The Truth
The propaganda technique being used by A Man On The Inside to program your brain is called “Pathologization” and here’s how it works: When a true or rational statement is presented through a character who speaks in an unhinged tone, with manic cadence, wild gestures, or paranoid affect, the audience subconsciously tags the content as mentally ill, even when the words are factually correct.
Another way entertainment journalists sometimes describe it is simply as the “crazy person speaks the truth trope.” It’s used deliberately to make the audience reject valid ideas by making them sound deranged through the way they’re delivered, or by making the person saying them seem insane, or by making the people opposed to those logical ideas into heroes.
So what does that have to do with A Man On The Inside? Everything.
How A Man On The Inside Pathologizes Usefulness
Season 2 of the show revolves around a place named Wheeler College. Like all modern college campuses, it’s an opulent palace of learning. The staff there doesn’t really do anything or teach anything of value. They get drunk a lot, sneer at people who build bridges (really, this actually happens), and regularly brag about how everything they teach is totally and completely useless in the outside world.
You might think these college professors would be the show’s villains, but instead they’re cast as A Man On The Inside’s sympathetic heroes.
Ted Danson plays A Man On The Inside’s series lead, an elderly detective named Charles Nieuwendyk. He’s hired to infiltrate the college and pretend to be a professor in order to find out who stole a laptop containing sensitive information. Should that laptop fall into the wrong hands, Wheeler College will lose the free money it’s getting from an asshole billionaire named Vinick (Gary Cole).
Vinick, we learn, has a plan to turn the college into a palace of learning. He wants Wheeler to become a leader in real education, a place that will help teach the innovators of the future and send its students out into the world to become future millionaires and billionaires. That plan makes him the season’s primary villain, and the heroic staff of Wheeler College, with the aid of Nieuwendyk, sets out to stop him from making their campus into something useful that might be good for its students.
Thinking Past The Sale To Collegial Paradise
Another screenwashing technique being used in concert by the show is a sales and hypnosis method called “thinking past the sale.” In thinking past the sale, rather than making an argument to bring someone to your point of view, you get them to think about the result of what you want and skip over the decision point.
In A Man On The Inside, we’re shown how idyllic and perfect life can be when College is useless and of no value, thinking past the sale of whether that’s a good idea. So, we’re shown to beautiful scenes of campus life, endless speeches about how college is a family, and we watch college professors getting drunk and going to parties and basically never doing any work at all, even when they’re in their opulent offices. College is portrayed as a paradise, a paradise that only works as long as it’s totally useless and nobody does anything or learns anything of value.
When the cost of attending Wheeler College comes up, students are portrayed as working dozens of simultaneous jobs to afford the tuition necessary to complete their social work degree, and though they’re working themselves to death, aren’t sleeping and burying themselves in lifelong debt with no way to pay it off, they’re grateful to suffer as long as it lets them be in this place of love, light, and family.
In case the audience starts to diverge from their programming, Vinick is always at hand to show up and wonder why no one is learning anything. He does that while being a huge, cartoonish jerk, just to make sure you associate his opinions on education needing to be useful as being totally and completely evil.
By the time the season’s over, Nieuwendyk’s own daughter has abandoned the successful career she used to support his grandchildren so she can join the wonderful world of taxpayer-funded lifelong students and lazy college professors. I guess her husband will have to pick up an extra shift, so she can drink coffee by the fountain in the quad. Meanwhile, Vinick has been banished back to the evil lair of hard-working billionaires from whence he came.
A History Of Successful Propaganda
Although A Man On The Inside’s execution of the Pathologization and Thinking Past the Sale techniques might seem clumsy and unlikely to work, they’ve frequently worked as propaganda tools in the past. Ever heard someone called a Stepford Wife? You know that term because, in the 1970s, a movie called The Stepford Wives popularized the idea that keeping your house clean and your children fed was a bad thing, by employing those same propaganda techniques.
A Man On The Inside’s screenwashing operation successfully flips the script on reality. In the actual 2025 United States, parents are pulling second mortgages, and teenagers are drowning in six-figure debt for degrees that qualify them to ask, “Do you want fries with that?”
Meanwhile, Netflix serves up eight hours of lavishly produced fantasy in which the only sin worse than uselessness is usefulness itself. The message of the entire season is: if you question the value of college, you’re not just wrong; you’re a heartless, money-obsessed monster who hates family, community, and fountain-side coffee chats.
So the next time someone tells you “college is still worth it for the experience,” listen to the cadence. Do they sound calm and reasonable, or are they wide-eyed, gesturing wildly, talking about “finding yourself” and “the family you choose”? Because if they sound even a little unhinged, congratulations: the Pathologization worked. Netflix got inside their head, and now they’re volunteering as unpaid recruiters for an industry that’s taking everything and giving back nothing.
Congratulations, future college students, you’ve been screenwashed.
