Diksha Sundriyal
Netflix’s ‘A Man on the Inside’ follows the story of Charles Nieuwendyk, a retired college professor who gets a second wind when he is hired by a private investigator to go undercover at a retirement home. When we meet Charles again in the second season, he has another juicy case fall on his lap when the President of Wheeler College comes to him for help. It turns out that his laptop has been stolen, and it is crucial to recover it because without it, the college will lose millions of dollars. This leads Charles to go undercover once again, this time in the form of a professor. Over the course of eight episodes, Wheeler College becomes an important character in the story, revealing more nuances about the people who consider it their home.
The Fictional Wheeler College is Brought to Life by an Iconic College
While Wheeler College is a crucial element of the second season of ‘A Man on the Inside,’ it is a fictional college, created to serve the plot. However, the filming of the same took place in the California Institute of Technology, aka Caltech, located at 1200 East California Boulevard in Pasadena, California. Spread over a 124-acre campus, Caltech is known to have housed some of the most brilliant minds in the world, including 48 Nobel laureates and 44 MacArthur Fellows, among other notable achievements. People like Albert Einstein, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Richard Feynman, Linus Pauling, and Kip Thorne, to name a few, have walked the halls as its faculty members.
The institute was established in 1891 by Amos Throop, who laid the foundation of Throop University, which was later taken over by George Ellery Hale and eventually named Caltech. Known for its groundbreaking research in science and technology, the institute has established ties with NASA and other leading research facilities throughout the world. It manages the Jet Propulsion Laboratory for NASA, through which they send probes into space to study the solar system. It also operates a network of research facilities and astronomical observatories worldwide, including the Seismological Laboratory and the Palomar and W. M. Keck Observatories.
The cast and crew of ‘A Man on the Inside’ set up camp at Caltech for its second season, using its expansive grounds to create Wheeler College. The institute emerges as a character unto itself, as, over the course of his investigation, Charles discovers that the attachment that the faculty and the students have with it runs deep. Moreover, the college has just as much to teach about life, friendship, and loyalty as it does academic things. In the end, the quest to find the culprit is revealed to be intrinsically connected with the well-being of the college. It raises the stakes for the story and gives the audience something to root for.
Read More: A Man on the Inside: Is The Netflix Show a True Story?
