explore the pursuit and value of
goodness; one brave enough to
feature giant toads, a bagel
shop named From Schmear to
Eternity, and references to
Kierke gaard and Hume. Only
14 chapters remain in this
underdog series that toiled in
overnight-ratings purgatory,
built a dedicated audience
online, charmed critics, won a
Peabody, and recently nabbed
five Emmy nominations. But
before retirement (not the soul-
disintegrating punishment fac-
ing Michael), a final test awaits
( besides the can humans evolve?
experiment): concluding this
paradigm-shifting adventure
on a heavenly note. “This will be
worth it,” declares Bell. “It will
give you a lot of feelings—and
one is a strong sense of satisfac-
tion. Not only will the ending be
worth it, you’ll understand why
the whole thing was worth it.”
Schur began plotting the exit
during season 2, as his show
burns through plot faster than
Eleanor through shrimp. “The
goal has been to chew through
story and accelerate things
twice as fast as the old system of
network TV suggested,” he says.
Not that the news was easy to
digest. “I was slightly stunned—
you rarely get canceled by your
creator,” says Danson. “But it
had so much integrity.”
That’s one quality the Soul
Squad aims to imbue in the test
subjects in the experiment that
could save Team Cockroach
(plus all of humanity) from eter-
nal torture via butthole spiders
and spastic dentistry. Season 3’s
finale unveiled the first two sub-
jects—Chidi’s neuroscientist ex
Simone (Kirby Howell-Baptiste)
and Tahani’s gossip-blogger foe
John (Brandon Scott Jones)—
and now viewers will meet a
pleasant-ish Norwegian and a
fourth soul who are “more
abstract in the ways they are
designed to drive everyone
crazy,” hints Schur. The Soul Squad faces great chal-
lenges in mentoring this foursome, with Eleanor doubly
taxed: She must lead the operation and tolerate the pain
of spending time with memory-wiped beau Chidi, who is
now what Schur calls “an ethical sleeper agent.”
Also in this ambitious and bonkers fourth season: a
new version of Janet; visits to old-school locales; returns
of old friends/fiends; surprise guests; a secret-spilling
baby elephant made of pure light; and an episode mod-
eled after a John le Carré mystery. “There’s no way any-
one’s going to conceive where we’re going with this,” says
Harper. “It’s like a board game,” adds Carden. “Not
Monopoly. More Candy Land vibes.” Bell chooses a dif-
ferent analogy: life (not the board game). “It is frustrat-
ing, requires effort, hilarious at times, and in the end is
really meaningful,” she explains. “And over too soon.”
As for that End, the cast found the capper to this com-
edy to be unexpectedly powerful and poignant. “After I
read the finale, the first thing I did was call my parents,”
shares Jacinto. Jamil needed a moment to fully embrace
it. “I raged against the ending ever so briefly when I first
read it,” she admits. “I wasn’t ready for it, emotionally.
But then, as the brilliance of it—the complete correct-
ness of it—washed over me, I started to accept it.”
How the audience will respond is both final frontier
and great unknown, but rest assured that one of come-
dy’s brightest and most humane minds strove to answer
those giant-picture questions that the series has been
asking. “We didn’t pull any punches,” he says. “This show
explicitly laid itself out like a book, in that we call every
episode a chapter and it feels like an old-timey serial in
the way that novels [were] published in magazines, one
chapter at a time. But it also means it’s like, ‘All right,
a--holes, whaddaya got? What’s the final chapter of the
book?’ So it definitely feels like a tall order.” Fans aren’t
asking for much—just a finale that unmasks the secrets
of the universe, redefines the human condition, takes
the Jaguars to the Super Bowl, and explains how to rig
one of those dope shrimp-dispensing soda fountains. �
Parks and Recreation
Schur found great meaning and
laughs in a season 4 scene of the
local-government comedy: “I’d
choose the sequence in Leslie’s
[Amy Poehler] campaign launch
when they have to walk across the
ice. It’s the essence of that entire
show—a large group of people,
moving together, trying to accom-
plish a very small task, crashing
and collapsing, but never giving
up. Plus, Ron [Nick Offerman]
is carrying a three-legged dog.”
Brooklyn Nine-Nine
NBC’s cop comedy locks up laughs
with its cold opens, and Schur
touts two (neither of which he
wrote): Jake (Andy Samberg) and
five suspects break into “I Want It
That Way” (season 5), and Charles
(Joe Lo Truglio) contracts “a Dianne
Wiest infection” (season 4). “Brook-
lyn was designed to maintain the
stand-alone Office comedy cold
opens,” he says, “and those two are
just perfect little slices of comedy.”
The Good Place
Noting that his favorite joke still
awaits, Schur selects the classic
season 1 exchange between
Eleanor (Kristen Bell) and Chidi
(William Jackson Harper): “Chidi is
beginning to walk Eleanor through
the Ancient Greeks and has writ-
ten on the board: Socrates, Plato,
Aristotle. Eleanor says, ‘Are we
sure we should be paying atten-
tion to these guys? It’s like, who
died and left Aristotle in charge
of ethics?’ And an incredulous
Chidi points and says, ‘...Plato!’
That was a model for us of how
we could write jokes about a
very dry subject. And Will just
bullseyed the delivery.”
THE GREAT
CREATOR
↓ “It’s complete,” Harper (with Bell) says of
the upcoming series finale
THE GOOD PLACE OVERLORD,
WHO’S AN EXEC PRDOUCER
ON NBC’S NEW KAL PENN
COMEDY SUNNYSIDE
(SEPT. 26), PICKS FAVORITE
JOKES FROM HIS SHOWS
MIKE SCHUR
fall
tv pre
view
2019
THE GOOD PLACE
: COLLEEN HAYES/NBC; SCHUR: GABRIEL OLSEN/WIREIMAGE
