About midway through The Good Place’s third season, Michael, an evil demon who went from torturing humans to helping them, makes a startling discovery - modern life has become so fraught with unintended consequences that even the most virtuous among us is resigned to eternal damnation. If the morally upright have no chance of making it to the good place, what chance do the merely mediocre have of a heavenly afterlife?
The Good Place has always been interested in the ethics of living. It is a morality play inside a love story inside a high brow social commentary with enough twists and turns along the way to keep viewers on their heels. The show began with a simple premise - what would happen if a self-proclaimed Arizona dirtbag named Eleanor Shellstrop, a “bad” person who lived venally, selfishly, and with little regard for others, was accidentally sent to heaven instead of hell? But with its plot twist season one finale, in which we learned that Eleanor, along with her three friends Chidi, Ta-Hani, and Jason, were actually in a simulacrum of the good place being operated by the guy they thought was a benevolent guide, and were actually lab rats in a bad place experiment he created to see how long they could torture each other, the show entered the cultural zeitgeist.
The show’s second and third seasons did much to prove that acclaim was well-earned. At first, Michael merely snapped his fingers and relaunched his experiment, but over 802 reboots, his four self-proclaimed cockroaches kept figuring him out. THIS IS THE BAD PLACE! Eleanor would inevitably realize (except reboot #649 when Jason figured it out, which really hurt) and <snap> another attempt would launch. Along the way, the show mused on goodness and morality and whether people can become better.
As to the final question, the show creator, Michael Schur, gave an emphatic yes. Eleanor and Jason, both shady characters during their lives, find grace in the afterlife. But beyond that, intention also came into view. Ta-Hani was a philanthropist motivated by a desire for adulation, not altruism. Chidi was so paralyzed by his own indecision that he never found love even though he lived his life by the tenets of the philosophers he revered. Each had their own hurdles to overcome, their own reckoning to acknowledge.
There was something intuitive about the show’s mediation on our lives on Earth. Every day, we calibrate our behavior, navigating the tricky calculus of right and wrong and good and bad. That these choices could be assigned values that would determine whether our after life will be spent in Eden or an eternal hell of penis flattening, bees with teeth, or an unremitting succession of New Yorker magazines has a facile logic.
By closing its bravura second season with a different kind of reboot, this time sending the humans back to Earth with a second chance at life after what were now just near death experiences, The Good Place looked to be firing on all cylinders. The show use that finale and the early part of the third season capturing what I think is at the core of much of the human condition. We try, we fail, we try again. We might be better but then we backslide, dust ourselves off, and give it another go. But the characters were never given a full opportunity to see how they would do without interference from the higher powers. Ever since, the show has relied on constant reinvention to mask a shrinking reservoir of plot. It is easy to miss the forest for the trees because the sleights of hand are so frequent (and executed so deftly) but at bottom, the core points the show was driving at - that it is possible to become a better person and that modern life is littered with too many unintentional consequences for anyone to make it to the Afterlife Hall of Fame - were made halfway through the third season, the show has treaded water ever since.
Do not get me wrong, at the granular level, The Good Place still delivers good laughs and witty banter, but thematically, it is a spent force. Rebooting the neighborhood with new characters would feel like a jump the shark moment except these new characters do not even rate, they are so underdeveloped as to be afterthoughts, barely given any time to shine. If the proof of concept is that the Soul Squad can get an entitled, middle aged white man to be slightly less of an officious jerk and a gossip blogger to be a touch less catty, that is fine, but should the future of all humanity rest on such a thin reed? Placing Chidi’s girlfriend in the mix is sort of interesting, but she was already a good person and her placement feels like a jerry rigged way to address the Chidi/Eleanor storyline. Ultimately, the early episodes of season four have felt like so much filler.
Schur should be applauded for creating a show of such originality that packs sight gags, snappy dialogue, and larger questions of the human condition into twenty-two minute chunks of deft storytelling, but a third of the way through the show’s final season, it looks like The Good Place ran out of runway.
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