TV

Why I Will Miss Being Wrong About ‘The Good Place’

'The Good Place' didn't need huge twists to continually surprise us.

by Cameron Williams  3 February 2020
The Good Place Season 4

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I quit The Good Place after two episodes when it began in 2016.

As a huge fan of the show’s creator, Mike Schur (The Office, Parks and Recreation), I couldn’t figure out if the I’d hyped the show too much or whether it was too bizarre for its own good.

The Good Place is a lot to take in.

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Conceptually, it’s one of the boldest mainstream TV series ever made. A comedy set in the afterlife that’s loaded with existential themes and philosophy — it’s a Big Bang Theory loving television executive’s nightmare.

The show’s timing was weird, too, because it arrived before the world circled the hellmouth with the US Presidential Election — it was a tough time to process a lot of information. Yet the opening episodes don’t fully represent the show people talk about when they talk about The Good Place because we were not in on the con yet (unless you were a genius).

Think back to the big plot points of the opening episodes: the neighbourhood malfunctions at the close of the series opener and the mishaps continue in ‘Flying’. A lot of things go wrong. Of course, it’s all part of Michael’s (Ted Danson) plan to torture humans in the bad place disguised as the good place, but the first impression I got from the show was each week was going to be goofy mishaps in the afterlife.

I thought Eleanor Shellstrop (Kristen Bell) was the show’s Ned Stark, her mistake would be rectified by the end of the season and she’d be gone. Throw in Schur’s excellent track record with workplace comedies and it felt like troubleshooting the hereafter could only last if they kept the heavenly curveballs interesting.

So, I walked away from The Good Place like a forkhead.

I Got It Wrong

I kept tabs on the show’s sentiment on social media and read reviews that were lukewarm with most citing the show’s potential as short-lived due to the concept.

Also, the first season consisted of only 13 episodes, which is tiny for comedy from a major American network. To make the situation worse, the season was split by a long hiatus that nudged it into 2017. None of this adds up to a show with a lot of network confidence and heavily investing time in a series at risk of a season one cancellation is always stressful.

During the season-one hiatus I’d seen a few people send out tweets that said: “The Good Place is the best show nobody is watching.” Now, the thing about these statements is there are usually eight shows at any one-time people perceive as the best show nobody is watching, but it’s a hell of a call. So, I decided to give The Good Place a second shot and use the break to get up to date.

I rebooted The Good Place.

In the first half of season one I still felt the same about the show’s concept, but it smashed through plot points that would usually sustain an entire season’s plot of a traditional show. For example, Eleanor confesses to being in the Good Place by mistake much earlier in season one.

I realised The Good Place had huge potential because it was a show that had to think faster and smarter to keep up its pace while still being hilarious. If I had any doubts about season one’s trajectory it was always sated by great jokes or delightful food puns.

I stuck with The Good Place and admitted I got it wrong.

And then the finale happened, and I realised how extremely wrong I had been.

Let’s Do The Twist

The season one finale of The Good Place was so impactful that it not only blew our forking minds, but it would define the show.

Considering a lot of pop culture is driven by fan theories and speculation online, the conversation around The Good Place was light in its early days. Yes, the show hard worked hard to throw us off its trail, or maybe it was just because Game of Thrones sucked all the speculative oxygen out of the internet.

Still, The Good Place season one finale is one of those genuinely great TV twists that’s sold with mad delight by Danson’s demonic laugh. But with every great twist comes expectations.

In the seasons that followed, all the way up to the end, The Good Place became a show to theorise about in anticipation of the next ingenious twist. The Good Place rebooted itself so many times that reinvention became part of the show’s fabric.

Before the beginning of season three I speculated about the show’s endgame, but felt solving mysteries has never been part of the appeal of The Good Place. After the beautiful series finale, I still feel the same but that didn’t stop me from theorising up a Reddit thread’s worth of ideas to anyone who would listen.

That’s why I’m going to miss being wrong about The Good Place.

I adored the misdirection. I loved anticipating the most basic plot points based on a lifetime of watching predictable TV only to be surprised a series with a big heart and an even bigger soul. The Good Place tricked us into thinking it had more devilish plans, but we got a moral and ethical quest that spanned entire Jeremy Bearimys.

Being A Good Person

The best parts of The Good Place are about trying to reconcile with the unexplainable.

We got hooked on the twist, and anticipated more, but Schur and his team of clever writers stacked the show with a quest for decency in truly cooked times. There’s no one way to do it. Chidi is proof of the complexities and inadequacies of basing moral and ethical decisions on the advice of the world’s greatest thinkers.

Eventually, you must process all the advice into your own code and you’re still going to mess up a lot. Confidence comes from knowing you’re doing your best.

The answers are open to interpretation, but team cockroach discovered it takes a community to get anywhere near close to ‘good’. The idea of being a ‘good person’ is insane as exemplified by the episode ‘Don’t Let the Good Life Pass You By’ where Doug Forcett (Michael McKean) lives according to the afterlife point system and it’s maddening.

That’s why The Good Place asked that we don’t be good people but better people. There’s room in life to be a messy bench but we must grow beyond our own self interests to make our short time on Earth count towards someone else. The Good Place recognised the good stuff wasn’t in grand gestures but quiet deeds.

The Good Place also gave us an ending.

Nothing ever ends in pop culture anymore. In ‘Patty’ the gang witnessed the perils of becoming a “happiness zombie”. Eleanor and Chidi experienced the futility of never-ending bliss when you don’t want a good thing to end in the series finale, which doubled as a mantra for the ongoing nature of popular television and when it enters syndication.

We live in a time where there’s Full House and Fuller House. Sometimes, great TV will end at the right time on its own terms, and The Good Place did it. From the second Jason Mendoza played the perfect video game, he knew it was time to walk through the door.

Each character had their own moment of zen; when you know, you know. Not many shows can claim to reconcile its own end with the fate of its characters with the same conclusiveness of The Good Place. When you look at it on paper, The Good Place is only 52 episodes, which is half of what’s required by TV standards to allow a show to live on in re-runs (think Friends).

Life is short, and so is The Good Place.

Cameron Williams is a writer and film critic based in Melbourne who occasionally blabs about movies on ABC radio. He has a slight Twitter addiction: @MrCamW.