100 Time February 3, 2020
T
he Good Place always sounded like
a match made in TV heaven: Beloved
star Kristen Bell. Comedy veteran Ted
Danson. And creator Mike Schur, a pro-
lific writer and producer who’d made his name as a
driving force behind acclaimed sitcoms The Office,
Parks and Recreation and Brooklyn Nine-Nine.
As we approach the end of its four-season
run, however, it’s clear the show was a gamble
for all involved—including NBC, which believed
in Schur enough to let him run with a wild idea.
Though trailers suggested a fantastical take on
his typical big hearted ensemble comedies, The
Good Place quickly revealed itself to be a very
funny but also quite earnest disquisition on moral
philosophy.
The saga begins with Bell’s Eleanor Shellstrop
opening her eyes outside the office of the avuncu-
lar Michael (Danson). She has died and gone to the
Good Place, he explains. As an “architect” in this
quasi secular heaven, one inhabited by only the
purest human souls, he’s built a neighborhood of
fro-yo shops and dream houses where she’ll spend
eternity with her soul mate, philosophy professor
Chidi Anagonye (William Jackson Harper).
The rub is, she’s not supposed to be there.
Eleanor is selfishness incarnate. So, is she morally
obligated to tell Michael the truth, even if it means
condemning herself to the Bad Place? How about
Chidi? Does it change anything when, in the final
moments of the premiere, her presence unleashes
chaos upon the neighborhood? Then again, what if
an eternity of torture isn’t the punishment that fits
Eleanor’s relatively mundane crimes?
So begins the cascade of ethical dilemmas
that catalyze her resolution to become a better
person, in hopes of saving her soul. With Chidi
as their teacher, and help from a scene-stealing
omniscient afterlife Siri (D’Arcy Carden’s Janet),
Eleanor and another possibly doomed couple
(Jameela Jamil’s snobby Tahani and Manny
Jacinto’s dim Jason) study moral philosophy.
The show reboots itself often, as the characters
discover that Michael’s poor excuse for heaven is
actually a No Exit scenario and, eventually, that
their quest for salvation will decide nothing less
than the fate of humanity.
Though it never quite attracted the massive
audiences or awards recognition it deserves, The
Good Place will end its run (with a 90-minute
finale airing Jan. 30) as one of the best TV shows
of its time. While packing episodes of screen
time with well-wrought jokes and devising twist
after game-changing plot twist, Schur’s team has
challenged viewers to grapple with big ideas and
crafted a surprisingly sharp reading of human
nature—one that’s neither overly naive nor
wholly depressing—amid the moral crises of the
Donald Trump era. It may also turn
out to be the last great show to air on a
broadcast network.With its fast production cycles
and constant demand for relevant script
fodder, TV has a unique capacity to
engage the cultural conversation as it
happens—and creators are especially
attuned to that potential in these hyper-
politicized times. Climate anxiety
haunted Game of Thrones. For years
now, the Black Lives Matter movement
has been inspiring shows that meditate
on race and policing: Shots Fired, Seven
Seconds, When They See Us. #MeToo
brought reckonings with powerful men
like Roger Ailes, Michael Jackson and
R. Kelly. Immigration is the central
theme of Freeform’s Party of Five
reboot and the Apple TV+ anthology
Little America.
TV is also grappling explicitly with
the most polarizing character alive:
our President. While late-night hosts,
Saturday Night Live and parody shows
like Our Cartoon President got repetitive
years ago, even before his election
win, Trump has been the bogeyman
of dramas from Scandal to American
Horror Story. Some of these portraits
are entertaining, but few provide novel
insight into a personality whose daily
violations of political norms have
turned pundits into broken records.
And they don’t speak to the souls of
viewers living in an era of widespread
moral confusion.
That’s where The Good Place comes
in. More than a sitcom with philo-
sophical subtext, it exists specifically
to explore, as Schur has put it, “what
it means to be a good person.” Though
the stakes keeps shifting, what has re-
mained constant throughout its run are
weekly demonstrations of how seem-
ingly abstract ideas like utilitarianism,
contractualism (whose urtext, Harvard
professor emeritus T.M. Scanlon’s What
We Owe to Each Other, gets frequent
shout-outs) and Kant’s categorical im-
perative underpin every decision we
make. When the show tackled Philippa
Foot’s classic “trolley problem”—which
asks whether it’s right to put one person
in danger in order to save five— Michael
conjured an actual speeding trolley.
Schur is hardly the only TV creatorTHE SHOW
CHALLENGED
VIEWERS TO
GRAPPLE WITH
BIG IDEAS AND
CRAFTED A
SHARP READING
OF HUMAN
NAT U R E
TimeOff Opener
△
Bell directs Danson
during a Season 4 episode
of The Good Place