In the closing minutes of the Season Three finale of The Good Place, Eleanor asks Janet a question - “what is the answer?” - one would expect from a show that traffics deeply in philosophy; but it also felt like a bit of a troll by show creator Michael Schur. If nothing else, The Good Place has mastered the art of leaving the answer to that question just out of reach. At first, we thought we were watching a show about an unworthy person’s attempt to cheat her way into heaven, then we found out she was actually in hell, along with the three people she befriended, as guinea pigs in an experiment to see how long they would torture each other. Then, through more than eight hundred reboots of their afterlife, they landed back on Earth, in their pre-deceased forms, trying to prove their worthiness for entry into eternal paradise. And now, they are back where they started, except with nemeses to thwart their improvement.
Are you exhausted? Me too (and I did not even attempt to explain the Jeremy Bearimy timeline, the side trip to Canada, or a handful of other plot lines). You see, just when we think we are about to get *the* answer, Schur just changes the question. Early on, that was an effective narrative device; indeed, the show’s entry into the pop culture zeitgeist coincided with the Season One finale reveal that Michael was not a benevolent architect, but rather, the evil mastermind who constructed the fake Good Place to torture Eleanor, Chidi, Ta-Hani, and Jason.
But like a spice that works well as a complement, but can overpower a dish if used with too heavy a hand, Schur’s willingness to continually blow up the story line suggests he is leaning too hard on flash over substance. In Season Three, the whole was far less than the sum of its parts. To be sure, there were individual episodes and scenes that really sang. Schur is still at his best when he uses humor to comment on the human condition. The neutral zone accounting department is staffed by a Bland Janet and workers who must assess points to new human behavior, 99 percent of which involve weird sexual things we do. In Australia, our main characters go to an American-themed restaurant where a handgun goes off when your table is ready and alcoholic beverages are served out of a Chevy hubcap. It is with a knowing wink that Michael marvels that a KFC and Taco Bell are under one roof and when he laments that his human form results in him feeling both too wet and too dry at the same time, the show reaches a level of absurdity and comic genius that makes it a small treasure.
And the season’s key takeaway, that modern life is so complicated and so much of what we do has secondary effects, that it is impossible for anyone to lead a virtuous life worthy of the Good Place is right on point. You may have met your soul mate through a dating app, but that app lives on a smart phone that was made by people working in awful conditions in the third world for a corporation that harvests your personal data and sells it to third-parties. The good outcome is severely crimped by all the bad stuff that got you there.
But here is the thing. While there is great wisdom in that observation, it is ultimately irrelevant to at least two (Eleanor and Jason) of the four main characters on the show. No one would suggest that a telemarketer who sold fake vitamins to old people or a low-level street thug from Jacksonville merit entry into an eternal heaven, regardless of how fraught any one purchase of an organic tomato might be. So why do I care about the people I am asked to root for if the premise I am asked to accept is irrelevant to them?
If the idea is that a benevolent higher power should change the Hall of Fame into the Hall of Very Good, or even that trying your best on earth (or in a simulacrum afterlife) should be enough to avoid an eternity of torture at the hands of bees with teeth (or penises), that is fine so far as it goes, but is it worthy of all our time and attention?
But the larger issue is Schur’s restlessness with his own story. Like a kid shifting in his seat, Schur toggles between different ideas and venues without letting the viewers ever get comfortable with one or the other. The Good Place shares a lot of DNA with LOST and I fear it is suffering from one of the latter show’s main shortcomings - lots of bells and whistles diverting from a core story line that simply does not have enough runway to justify season renewal after season renewal. Schur used plot twists to great effect in Seasons One and Two, but in the service of continuing to keep the audience guessing, I think Season Three was too cute by half. Instead of allowing the audience to linger in one place, the show kept hopscotching across space and time. If you did not like the Soul Squad in Australia, you need only wait a few episodes before they were heading off to the Accounting Department in the DMZ between the Good and Bad Places, where you barely got comfortable before zooming off to Canada or Mindy’s Medium Place, or wherever else. You need not invest in any particular storyline because Schur is constantly snapping his fingers and rebooting the show.
Some criticism has been levied about the sharper focus on Eleanor and Chidi, but my concern is over the broader narrative drift. Ta-Hani and Jason have been reduced to one note bit players - she name drops incessantly and he says dopey things as comic relief, and any semblance of logic or rationale went out the window long ago.
The Good Place was tailor-made to be a well-told three-act story, but since it has been renewed for a fourth season, it would benefit from the thing that finally focused
LOST - a definitive end point. Having been with
The Good Place since the beginning and seeing it gain greater cultural currency during its standout
second season, it pains me to say it, but Season Three failed to deliver.
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