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probing the nature of good and evil,
right and wrong. Some of the best, most
timely dramas of the late 2010s— Better
Call Saul, Fargo, Watchmen—posed
similar questions. Yet none has dared
to write a prescription as explicit as
the one The Good Place is now career-
ing toward. In such complex times, it’s
selfishness, complacency and a lack
of empathy that make a genuinely bad
person, Schur told BuzzFeed last fall:
“What matters is that you’re trying.”
if The Good Place isn’t a total outlier
in the vast matrix of Peak TV, which
reportedly cranked out more than 500
scripted programs in 2019, it’s certain ly
the only show with such lofty ambi-
tions still airing on a broadcast net-
work. Over the past decade, viewers
have abandoned the Big Five (NBC,
CBS, ABC, Fox and the CW) in droves—
first for cable, then streaming. Many of
offending more conservative viewers
who constitute a significant portion of
their older audiences, or simply their
long-standing tradition of catering to
middle-of-the-road taste, broadcasters
have seemed particularly averse to
political controversy lately. CBS stalwart
The Good Wife begat The Good Fight, but
episodes of that great (and outspokenly
anti-Trump) spin-off debut on pay
platform CBS All Access. Like The
Simpsons before it, Fox’s current adult-
animation highlight Bob’s Burgers, now
in its 10th season, is starting to show its
age. The CW’s most inventive shows,
Jane the Virgin and Crazy Ex-Girlfriend,
ended their runs in 2019. Now, its youth-
focused slate is all superheroes, reboots
and Riverdale clones.
For decades, NBC was the gold stan-
dard for sitcoms. It had Seinfeld, 30 Rock,
The Cosby Show, Sanford and Son,
Cheers, Community and Schur’s shows.
Without The Good Place, only the good
but not groundbreaking Brooklyn Nine-
Nine and Superstore will carry the torch.
It remains to be seen whether Schur’s
upcoming projects will appear on NBC,
its soon-to-be-launched streaming ser-
vice Peacock or elsewhere in the compa-
ny’s multiplatform empire.
It’s probably not a coincidence that
so many revivals of extraordinary net-
work shows of the past—Arrested De-
velopment, Twin Peaks, Veronica Mars,
The Twilight Zone—have turned up on
cable and streaming, with their younger,
more affluent audiences. (Meanwhile,
ABC pandered to working-class viewers
with the ill-fated decision to bring back
Roseanne.) Even PBS is hemorrhaging
beloved series: The Great British Bak-
ing Show is now on Netflix, and Sesame
Street episodes premiere on HBO. We
may have an excess of TV in 2020, but if
you want the good stuff, you have to pay
for it. That isn’t an option for everyone.
Maybe the devolution of free view-
ing options doesn’t seem like such a
tragedy; anyone can borrow a book
from a library, after all. But as TV ce-
ments its place as the predominant
popular art form of our politically and
economically polarized time, it matters
that anyone with TV could watch The
Good Place. As Schur put it in a speech
at Notre Dame, “If television can’t make
us better people, then nothing can.” □broadcasters’ most innovative creators,
from Shonda Rhimes and Ryan Murphy
to Damon Lindelof and Amy Sherman-
Palladino, have followed. (Schur, by
contrast, reupped with Universal Tele-
vision, NBC’s production subsidiary, in
a multiyear deal last March.) The van-
guards of a younger cohort—Phoebe
Waller-Bridge, Donald Glover, Issa
Rae, Sam Esmail, BoJack Horseman’s
Raphael Bob-Waksberg—essentially by-
passed the networks entirely.
As a result, excellence is harder than
ever to find on the Big Five. And though
the overall shift has been gradual, the
past few years have seen the networks’
few remaining standouts wrap up, only
to be replaced by formulaic doctor
and lawyer shows, saccharine family
sitcoms and bland reality competitions.
(Who’s excited for The Masked
Dancer?) Whether it’s the result of their
dependence on advertisers, fear of