Has The Good Place Run Out of Things to Say?

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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Links to reviews of Seasons One, Two, and Three. 

The Good Place - Season Two

When I first wrote about The Good Place midway through its first season, it felt like writing about a small indie band very few people had heard of. While the show featured two legitimate stars – Kristen Bell and Ted Danson – NBC’s 13-episode commitment and the show’s premise, of an unworthy soul put in eternal paradise, did not scream visionary art, but then it happened. Keener viewers than me surely saw the season finale plot twist – that Eleanor Shellstrop (Bell), along with her three friends Chidi, Tahani, and Jason, were not in the “good” place after all, but rather, an elaborately staged simulacrum of the good place that was in fact, the “bad” place (i.e., hell). Eleanor’s eureka moment, as the group is fighting over who will go to what they think is the bad place to save the others left show creator Michael Schur with one last rabbit to pull out of his hat – a cliffhanger where Michael (Danson) is revealed to be the diabolical mastermind behind the scheme. Once his ruse is discovered, Michael simply snaps his fingers, wipes everyone’s memory, and starts all over again.

It was bravura television and since I did not see the plot twist coming, the ending did what I suspect Schur hoped – it required me to rewatch the entire season with a totally different understanding of what was going on. It was so clever and so unexpected, that I had no idea what direction Season Two would take. At the risk of repeating the error of writing about Season One before it ended, if anything, Season Two has exceeded its predecessor’s high standard. Having shown his ability to think outside the writing box once, Schur did it again. Instead of simply making the second season a carnival-funhouse-mirror version of the first, he conceded the point early on – Michael would create a new “good” place, and every time, Eleanor would figure it out: THIS IS THE BAD PLACE she screamed, in everything from monk’s garb to a cowgirl outfit (well, except attempt #649 when Jason figured it out, which, as Michael whined, was a real low point.)

And so, the narrative arc became not about Michael’s efforts to torture the humans, but his need to partner with them to avoid being retired (having his essence scooped out with a flaming ladle and his every molecule placed on the surface of a different sun) and sending them to the bad place when Sean, his boss, discovers that Michael did not merely do a second reboot, but more than eight hundred. Of course, because Season One ended with such a dramatic plot twist, even as Michael was incorporated into “Team Cockroach” you were never quite sure where his allegiances fell.

To Danson’s credit, his virtuoso performance is the beating heart of the show. His two-steps-forward-one-step-back effort to become a better err demon centers much of the second season’s best humor. In an ethics lecture focused on the “trolley car” problem (whether to crash into a group of five people or steer the trolley onto a side track and kill only one), Michael misses the point entirely, instead speculating about how you can kill all six people (hang a pole out the side with a blade attached to lop off the one person’s head and run over the other five – DUH). In the same episode, he casually mentions that being French automatically sends you to the bad place (plus, while stealing a loaf of bread scores -17 points, three are added if it’s a baguette, because it makes you vaguely French). When Janet’s unresolved feelings for Jason threaten to destroy the neighborhood, Michael refuses to kill her, lamenting that she is his friend, and later, he reluctantly comes clean to Eleanor and the gang when they realize he has no plan to get them to the real good place.

Opting for this story telling arc allowed Schur to dig far deeper into the ethical and philosophical conundrums we experience. Is lying okay in certain circumstances? When can you put your own needs over those of others? Can you trust an actual demon? Schur is neither pedantic nor heavy-handed in tackling these problems. Like the parent who slips veggies into the chocolate chip cookies, his musings on these cosmic queries are done with a light touch. Eleanor notes the value of the little white lie, just dressed up in the fancier cloak of “situational ethics.” Michael’s coded message to the group at a satirical comedy roast just before they are to be sent to the bad place is laced with references to Kant and Kirkegaard, but you do not need a two a.m. dorm room rap session to follow along.

And because Schur so successfully flipped the script to end Season One, the possibilities for how Season Two will end are limitless. We wait to see if our four heroes will convince the judge that they belong in the real good place, but do they? Tahani, for example, has not really shown much growth. When she learns she was felled by a statue of her sister, her takeaway was not that she wasted her mortal life nursing an insatiable amount of jealousy toward her sibling, but rather, that she died in Cleveland. Similarly, when she confides in Janet that she uses the “Duke” test (either university or title of nobility) for her dating partners and that Jason was unemployed at the time of his death (and in the sad way, not the good, rich way), she exposes her elitist attitudes just as much as when she name drops Johnny Depp (they dated), Taylor Swift (her best friend), and Vanessa Redgrave (whose panic room she was in with Javier Bardem). Jason has remained an amiable dunce throughout, and while he attracted both Janet (they married in Season One) and Tahani (they “pounded it out” in Season Two), has he done anything to distinguish himself other than sharing a story of slashing a rival dance crew’s tires to avoid a confrontation and securing the group’s escape from Sean by lobbing a Molotov cocktail and yelling JORTLES?

This is where the unpredictability Schur inserted thanks to his season one twist will really come into play and also why his mentioning that The Good Place shares storytelling DNA with LOST may also be meaningful. After all, LOST was about souls stuck in purgatory who needed to learn how to trust and have faith in one another before they could receive their eternal reward. Might something similar happen to our fab four? Then again, we may find out Michael played a long con (another LOST nod) and a snap of the fingers may result in an 803rd reboot.

Season Two also provided a few callbacks for fans like me. We get a cameo from Mindy St. Clair, eternally living in the “medium” place (which happens to be a suburban home from the 1980s that includes a clunky old VCR and the Pierce Brosnan “World’s Sexiest Man” issue of People magazine) as a horny cokehead in a period-perfect big shouldered skirt and jacket combo. When we learn Janet came up with the idea of using frozen yogurt as the thematic food for the neighborhood (frozen yogurt being a food people think they enjoy but know is kind of a bummer) I was reminded of Michael’s observation from Season One that he liked frozen yogurt because it showed how humans will take something perfect (ice cream) and ruin it just a little so they can have more of it. Similarly, when Eleanor and the team give Michael a “starter kit” for being human, which includes a set of car keys (which he can ask if anyone has found or tap his pockets to look for), I thought of Michael’s lament from Season One that he wanted to have human experiences, like pulling a hamstring or telling someone to “take it sleazy.” And when the group decides to risk going through the real bad place so they can plead their case for entry into the real good place before an all-powerful judge, Michael is thrilled because it is a futile plan, created with unearned confidence, and doomed to fail – in other words, a quintessentially human idea.

It is in these scenes where Schur’s sharp eye for the human condition shines. The demons who run the “toxic masculinity” shop in the bad place are of course frat bros who fist pound and ball tap each other while prepping for the creator of “Girls Gone Wild” inevitably arriving in hell. Sean, Michael’s boss, notes that he selected the body of a 45-year-old white man because that is the easiest way to fail upward. And, in what I thought was one of the more poignant lines in Season Two, Eleanor explains to Michael, who had just experienced the existential crisis of mortality, that the reason humans are always “a little sad” is that we understand that we all die one day. It is these minor riffs and grace notes that make the show something more than just a philosophy lesson put through a pop culture blender and one of the many reasons it is my favorite thing on television.

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TV Review - The Good Place

There are few questions in life bigger than what happens when we die. Does heaven exist? Worse, does hell? And if so, where will our actions on earth leave us when we pass away. Not exactly what you would expect the plot of a television sitcom to grapple with, but comes now The Good Place, NBC’s winning new Thursday night comedy. In this rendering of the afterlife, judgment is unremitting and scientific - your earthly deeds tallied based on the amount of positivity or negativity they put into the world. [1] You truly need to be exceptional to gain admittance into the “good place,” which explains why every President but Lincoln, along with Picasso, Mozart, Elvis Presley, and Florence Nightingale are in the “bad place” while ordinary people like ethics professors, marriage counselors, Buddhist monks and a thirty-three year-old telemarketer from Arizona named Eleanor Shellstrop [2] are among the 322 souls who avoided that awful fate and landed in one of the good place’s perfect neighborhoods.

Overseeing the neighborhood is its architect, Michael, an otherworldly being manifested in the body of Ted Danson and Janet, his sidekick cum information repository for every bit of knowledge in the universe. Michael revels in the minutiae of the human condition. He is obsessed with the TV show Friends, finds amusement in the banality of karaoke and other pop culture ephemera like wax lips and Minions stuffed animals. [3] But Michael has little time to admire his handiwork. Shortly after Eleanor’s arrival, things start going horribly wrong, with everything from trash falling from the heavens to flying prawns being eaten by giant frogs and an enormous sink hole threatening to undo his meticulously planned community. We think it is Eleanor’s presence - unwarranted because of her rap sheet of social crimes (lying about whose name was pulled from a hat to determine who would be designated driver at a girl’s night out) and misdemeanors (leaving a dog sitting gig a day early to see Rihanna, which results in the dog overeating and becoming obese) that is to blame, but there is more to this mystery than meets the eye.

Show creator Michael Schur has indicated his writing was influenced by the groundbreaking ABC drama LOST and hints of that show can be seen in The Good Place. Flashbacks are used as a device to fill in the characters’ backstories but also to provide nuance and subtlety. Eleanor’s reluctant partner in crime is Chidi, the “real” Eleanor’s eternal soul mate [4] who, conveniently, was also a professor of ethics and is in a keen position to help “fake” Eleanor become a better person. But Chidi had his own earthly dilemmas. His 3,600 page treatise on ethics went unread [5] and the guilt of telling a minor lie to a co-worker about a pair of red leather boots so tortured Chidi he finally confessed the lie after the co-worker emerged unscathed from surgery for an aneurysm. [6] While Chidi is unquestionably virtuous and hates lying, was it worth the pain he caused his friend for what was essentially a fib in the service of the social contract?  

We also meet Tahani, a slightly pretentious philanthropist, It Girl, and one-time Baz Luhrmann muse [7] and her soulmate Jianyu, a Buddhist monk who has taken a vow of silence. Tahani may seem perfect, but her backstory includes lingering in the shadow of her more talented sibling, never receiving her parents’ approval and then suffering the ultimate humiliation when they die by being left out of their will because they spelled her name wrong. And finally, Jianyu is actually a small-time DJ and drug dealer from Jacksonville, Florida named Jason Mendoza who loves jalapeño poppers and EDM, but can also illustrate the philosophical tenet of utilitarianism by describing an incident when he framed a friend’s girlfriend for the theft of some boogie boards to keep his break dancing crew together. [8]

At its most general level, the show is invested in considering a simple question: should a “bad” person be given a second chance? Eleanor has inadvertently landed in the good place because of a mishap that occurred when she and a woman with the exact same name died at the exact some moment. The “other” Eleanor was an attorney who helped children in Ukraine and got innocent people off death row while our Eleanor sold fake vitamins to elderly people and generally acted in a selfish way towards everyone in her life. 

At first, the answer seems relatively straight forward. The havoc Eleanor wreaks ebbs when she corrects her behavior, but as the show pivoted toward the back half of its 13-episode run, we learn that the other Eleanor, the “real” Eleanor, is toiling away in the bad place, being tortured on a daily basis by being made to plan a baby shower for a woman she does not know and eating food that tastes like spider webs. [9] The dilemma brings two aspects of the show into sharper relief - the “fake” Eleanor is taking the place of someone who is not only deserving, but being forced to suffer the punishments “fake” Eleanor should be enduring and Chidi is being blocked from eternal bliss with his soul mate. Like LOST, which was overt in its homage to various philosophical tenets, The Good Place ruminates on these bigger questions but in a much more light hearted way.

The casting throughout is spot on. In the title role, Kristin Bell could have played Eleanor as a one note “hot mess,” after all, she dies in a grocery story parking lot after purchasing “Lonely Girl Margarita Mix For One” [10] but Bell’s portrayal is deeper than that. While she may default to chicanery and the easy way out, there is a budding sense of decency beneath the sass and potty mouth. She is capable of feeling guilt and is honest enough to note that being around “good” people makes her uncomfortable because of her own shortcomings. 

Danson is her equal and then some. His Michael is droll, whimsical, and endlessly fascinated by popular culture. Michael basks in the absurdity of life but is also its most pointed observer. The good place is littered with frozen yogurt shops, so when Eleanor asks Michael if he has heard of ice cream, he says he has, but likes frozen yogurt because it shows how humans will take something great and ruin it just a little so they have have more of it. [11] What a perfect description of mankind. Later, when Michael thinks he is to blame for the neighborhood woes and decides to retire, he laments the simple joys he will never experience - like pulling a hamstring or ending a quick conversation by telling someone to “take it sleazy.” [12] 

A late arrival to the show is Michael’s opposite number from the “bad place,” Trevor (a letter perfect Adam Scott in all his unctuous glory) whose jerky behavior includes telling women to “smile” and serving Manhattan clam chowder at room temperature on the train to the bad place. His posse are vain and narcissistic, constantly snapping selfies, mocking their good place opposites and literally snorting time. [13]

The big question, not unlike discovering the inside of the “hatch” on LOST, is, what now? Having pulled off the big reveal that Eleanor is an imposter within the show’s first half-season, where will the show take us? We know there is at least one other neighborhood fraud (Jianyu, who is outed by Tahani after she followed a trail of snack food crumbs and a surreptitious observation of Jianyu tapping a keg for the “bad place” posse to discover his “bud hole,” which is most definitely not a meditation retreat) and a higher being named Sean (a more perfectly anodyne name for a supreme being I do not know) will adjudicate the question of what to do with Real & Fake Eleanor. Might there be other glitches in the system or is this even “the good place” at all, a la the LOST island as a purgatory for those on the way to the great beyond. I can’t wait to find out.

The Good Place returns to NBC on January 5, 2017. 

END NOTES

1. Negative impacts include, among other things, being the commissioner of an american football league (-824.55), using the term “bro-code” (-8.20), using “Facebook” as a verb (-5.55) and oh yeah, committing genocide (-435,288.74). On the other hand, positive impacts include remaining loyal to the Cleveland Browns (+53.83), the 94 times you gracefully ended a conversation about the weather (cumulative total +79.80), not discussing your veganism unprompted (+9857.02) and yes, ending slavery (+814, 748.95). Everything Is Fine, Season 1, Episode 1. 

2. Eleanor’s birthdate is October 14, 1982 (although while alive she lied and said it was 1986) and since the show started before her 34th birthday in 2016, her age at death was 33. Most Improved Player, Season 1, Episode 8. 

3. What We Owe To Each Other, Season 1, Episode 6. 

4. In the good place, you are reunited with your actual soul mate. Everything Is Fine, supra.

5. Tahani Al-Jamil, Season 1, Episode 3. 

6. What We Owe To Each Other, supra.

7. Tahani Al-Jamil, supra.

8. Category 55 Emergency Doomsday Crisis, Season 1, Episode 5. See also, Jason Mendoza, Season 1, Episode 3. 

9. Someone Like Me As A Member, Season 1, Episode 9. 

10. Everything Is Fine, supra.

11. What We Owe To Each Other, supra.

12. Here, Michael’s suffering is two-fold. His disappointment at eating his first Saltine (too dry, too salty) is made worse when Tahani tells him to “take it sleazy” to which he moans, YOU got to say it? His retirement is not to some heavenly Palm Beach, but rather, having his essence scooped out of his earthly body and eternal beatings with a sharp object. The Eternal Shriek, Season 1, Episode 7. 

13. Someone Like Me As A Member, supra.