The Mix
36 | Rolling Stone | September 2019
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BCterlife itself. But after the success of
Parks and Recreation and Brooklyn
Nine-Nine, creator Schur was offered a
rare opportunity in television.
“This all started,” he recalls, “from
NBC doing something insane, which
was telling me that they would take
any idea I had and guarantee it 13 epi-
sodes. And what I took from that offer
was, ‘Well, I now owe it to the concept
of ideas to come up with a crazy idea.’
Why play it safe in that scenario?”
Schur was already fixated on no-
tions of fairness and ethics. He first
developed the show’s concept of
a point system to get into the Good
Place while fighting L.A. traffic and
deducting or adding points for other
drivers based on how they behaved on
the road. He found it was a fascination
he shared with Bell, with whom he’d
worked briefly on Parks.
“It’s something I think about a lot,”
Bell says. “Not one person owns Earth.
We’re here together, one big family,
whether we want to admit it or not.
And in a family, people have to coop-
erate or it’s dysfunctional. How do you
do that? Are there rules? Should there
be? Who has ideas about the rules?”
Schur tries to practice what the
show preaches. He’s long had a “no
assholes” rule on his sets, unusual in a
business where bad behavior is often
indulged as the alleged price of great
art. The writing staff regularly consults
with philosophy professors for story
ideas. (Harper, who as Chidi has to ex-
plain most of the show’s ethical con-
cepts to the audience, admits he often
turns to Wikipedia for a basic grasp of
them, because he finds key Good Place
texts like T.M. Scanlon’s What We Owe
to Each Other too dense.) The show’s
themes have gradually infected most
of the cast and crew. Producers have
instituted a series of green policies
(electric vans or solar power when-
ever possible, no plastic water bottles)
extreme even for a Hollywood set.
Writer Megan Amram says the writ-
ers room can get intense: “We talk at
length about death, what it means to
be a good person, and how we are gen-
uinely trying to change our day-to-day
lives to be better people. We sucked
so bad when we started the show, and
now we’re all vegetarians. It’s great.”
Jamil has stopped killing insects,
and admits her behavior is now influ-
enced by Schur’s point system. “You
never come to Hollywood and become
a better person,” she says. “That’s not
the way it’s supposed to be.”I
N ANOTHER ERA, a show about
ethics would have been a hard-
er sell, but this one happened
to debut in the fall of 2016. “It didn’t
hurt that from the moment the showaired,” Schur notes, “the word ‘ethics’
was appearing in every newspaper on
Earth every day.”
“I think we’re craving positive en-
tertainment now,” argues Bell, high-
lighting one of the few upsides of
America’s ongoing sociopolitical mal-
aise. “Eight years ago, five years ago,
when the world felt safer, it felt OK to
root for an antihero. Walter White was
awesome, because the world felt safer,
right? Now, the world feels unsafe, and
I don’t think people want to turn the
television on to that. I think they want
to see people fighting for good.”
None of this would matter if the
show weren’t so forking (to borrow
Eleanor’s profanity workaround that
keeps her from cussing in the after-
life) funny and inventive at every turn.
There’s a density of jokes in every
scene that the actors find inspiring.
The writers use and discard plot ideas
in a single episode that most showswould devote entire seasons to, just
to keep viewers excited and engaged.
“The show is incredibly optimis-
tic and snarky,” suggests Harper. In
other shows right now, “if there’s op-
timism or any sort of openhearted-
ness, it lacks bite. And if it has a lot of
bite, it’s just completely devoid of any
heart. And I feel like our show has a re-
ally good meshing of the two.”
The series has its own in-house visual-
effects wizard, David Niednagel, to
bring the writers’ strange inventions
to life. But Danson himself supplies
at least as much of the magic with a
performance that’s everything Schur
asks of him and more: otherworldly
but also deeply childlike and vulner-
able, cartoonish but also capable of
intense, admirable humanity. Carden
jumps back in her chair and grips the
armrests recalling the creepy laugh
Danson improvised in the scene whereEleanor figures out that she and her
friends are really in the Bad Place. She
and all of Danson’s other co-stars light
up when talking about how humble
and genuinely curious he still is, in a
way that goes beyond normal Holly-
wood platitudes about how everyone
in the cast is a family.
“He’s just kind of joy personified,”
says Bell. “He’s witty, and he’s happy
from the moment he wakes up until
about 3 p.m. And then he gets sleepy.”
Jamil had never acted before being
cast and was terrified during the film-
ing of her first scene, where Michael
introduces Eleanor to Tahani. To
break the tension, she says, Danson
“just kept on pretending to fart on me.
Which was so weird but brilliant, and
just made me feel so instantly com-
fortable. He kept making himself seem
as little and silly as humanly possible,
because he could tell that I was awe-
struck by him.”Danson once famously opted to end
Cheers for fear it would grow stale.
Now he finds himself on the receiving
end of a similar choice by Schur, who
chose to make this upcoming fourth
season The Good Place’s last, having
told his sprawling story at warp speed.
It’s a decision everyone understands,
even as none of them want to let go.
“I think we don’t know how lucky
we are,” says Danson. “I’m really
proud to have been part of it. It’s a
great conversation to be had. And the
fact that 11- and 12-year-olds are com-
ing up loving the show, to me that’s
when kids are just starting to turn
their headlights on and they’re under-
standing humor and they’re impres-
sionable and smart. So if they like the
show, we’re doing something right.”
“I suppose I feel exactly the way it
would feel at the end of your life,” says
Bell. “I know it has to end, but I didn’tquite get enough and I want a little
more.” At 39, with two little kids at
home, Bell is thinking about taking a
step back from work. “Maybe this is a
great note to go out on,” she suggests.
“I’ll do a movie here or there, or be a
guest star, but maybe I won’t be num-
ber one on the call sheet anymore.”
It’s hardest on the less-experienced
cast. “I am unemployed, so if you have
anything, please let me know,” Jacinto
jokes. “I can wash your car.”
Through her infectious perfor-
mance as the all-knowing, all-power-
ful, always-optimistic Janet, Carden
may embody the series more than any-
one. She gets choked up just thinking
about the conclusion of her big break.
“You want to hear something really
cheesy?” she asks. “If you really think
about it, if someone were to design my
Good Place, it would be this. It sucks
that now my Good Place is ending. But
it’s good, it’s good. It’s right.”SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE
WRITER, 1997-2004
Though focused on ”Weekend Update”
and politics (see Al Gore and George W.
Bush as The Odd Couple), he co-wrote the
“Turd Ferguson Celebrity Jeopardy” skit.THE OFFICE
WRITER-PRODUCER, 2005-2007
Schur wrote many memorable early epi-
sodes like “Office Olympics” and “Christ-
mas Party” — and wore a neckbeard to
play Dwight’s weird cousin Mose.PARKS AND RECREATION
SHOWRUNNER, 2009-2015
He teamed with Office boss Greg Daniels
and Amy Poehler to create the sweetly
hilarious ode to public service that made
stars of Chris Pratt, Aziz Ansari, and more.BROOKLYN NINE-NINE
SHOWRUNNER, 2013-PRESENT
When Fox canceled the endearingly
goofy cop show starring Andy Samberg
and Andre Braugher last year, the outcry
was so great, NBC rescued it a day later.FROM ‘SNL’ TO ‘THE GOOD PLACE’
For more than two decades, writer-producer Mike Schur has crafted some
of TV’s finest sitcoms and sketches. Here, a few of his greatest hits