The world is fukked, so let us end it tonight, or why The Good Place was a great show that turned terrible (among other things)
During the last thirteen years, I came to acquire an AppleTV device. The reasons for this were as odd as they were practical. I was watching The Handmaid’s Tale (a series I will talk about in the near future) on an iPad. Awkwardly balanced on the arm of a very old lounge seat. Well, after it fell off said arm and landed on the floor, thankfully only damaging the charging cable in the process, I thought about my “streaming” (Internet TV going forward) needs.
I had a fifty-inch television that still had a few years of life left in it. I had a 7.1 channel amplifier, and a corresponding number of speakers. If you have ever heard a Dolby Atmos or DTS: X soundtrack through 7.1 speakers, you will understand why. By the way, the “.1” refers to the Low Frequency Effects channel, or subwoofer for the not-technically-minded. Anyhoo, I found myself reasoning this way. I have the screen, I have the sound setup, so why the hell am I watching visual entertainment on a device that was bought for the purpose of drawing electronic art on?
So an AppleTV one year, and after a couple of more years, a subscription to Netflix. And then I discovered The Good Place. Once I learned that Ted Danson was in the show, my viewing of The Good Place was all but assured.
The Good Place started out as a much deeper story than you will be used to from American television. Essentially, a woman named Eleanor Shellstrop (Kristen Bell) wakes up in a waiting room, is invited into an office by a man named Michael (Ted Danson), and he tells her that she is dead. The next revelation is that she is in “the good place”, or heaven if you will. No particular variant on heaven (the Heaven Of Endless Good Art And People To Appreciate It With would be my first choice). Just, heaven. Her profile and record is read out to her with some explanations of how her actions got her into the good place, and she is shown to a place she will live in along with a “soul mate”.
Only problem is, Eleanor knows she does not belong in the good place. She was an obnoxious functional alcoholic with a sense of responsibility both social and immediate that would make your average conservative say “damn”, and an aversion to challenge that makes the word “phobia” seem weak. So her “soul mate”, Chidi (William Jackson Harper), wracked with guilt at either of the basic choices he is faced with, elects to help Eleanor by teaching some moral philosophy. The subject he was a professor in during his lifetime. (By the way, it is pronounced Chee-dee.)
Now, a heads-up. I once published an article stating that people who moan about “spoilers” are bastards. Long story short, in 1987 I read an issue of MAD Magazine that contained a satire of the greatest film ever made, RoboCop. It laid out in MAD Magazine style all of the most basic plot points of the film. In spite of this, RoboCop blew me away because it was just that fukking good. If surprise is the only tool you have in your bag to wow the audience, quit storytelling now because you suck at it.
Over the course of the first season, a number of unsettling events occur that reflect Eleanor’s certainty that there has been a mistake. And the final twist is that Eleanor susses out that no, she is not in the good place at all. She is in a radical new design of hell that allows the demons to direct newly-deceased Humans to torture each other. Chidi has a decision-making problem that makes Eleanor miserable, Eleanor’s cynicism and selfishness makes Chidi miserable. The other two Humans in the story, one is a moron even by Florida standards and the other makes Narcissus seem humble. (For those who do not understand that last description, a Wikipedia page about Narcissus can be found here. Long story short, he falls in love with his reflection in a pool of water and stays looking at it for eternity.)
The remaining three seasons concern themselves with how the four subjects of the experiment to make Humans torture one another (just like they do in their mortal lives) improve themselves. Chidi becomes a gateway through which all of the philosophical dilemmas the show is based on are brought in.
The reason I lay all of this out is because my favourite character outside of Michael is the Judge (Maya Rudolph), an arbitrator of all the conflicts that running heaven and hell would inevitably bring up. Her appearance is prompted by the revelation that the system by which eligibility for the good place is determined has failed to keep pace with the complexity of Human life. The Judge proclaims herself to be as old as hydrogen, so one can understand that she might be a bit set in her ways. So the solution she arrives at is to hit the reset button, extinguish all life on Earth (which, much to my aggressive dissent, includes bears and ducks), and start over.
That is not really how the universe works, just to be clear. But Fjörgyn will soon be following a similar tack, given the manner in which Humans behave in spite of the warning signs. Let us go over one very good and alarming example. The Asstralian bushfires of 2019 and 2020 were unprecedented in many ways. For some context, let us bring up the fact that their (conservative, unsurprisingly) Prime Minister went in front of the press and proclaimed that bushfires were simply a fact of life in Asstralia. The statement was true in that Asstralia does have bushfires regularly, generally once a year.
But 2019 to 2020 bushfire season began before the beginning of June (in Autumn, in other words) and continued until the middle of January in 2020. So you have Autumn, Winter, Spring, and half of Summer, all bushfire. That is not a season. That is pretty much a whole year. And the saying “where there is smoke, there is fire” works in both directions. Sydney had so much smoke blowing in from the West that its air quality was at one point deemed to be less than that of Beijing.
Fjörgyn is probably cursing the day that she did not take the option of washing what are today known as Asstralians away when she had the chance. Because only they could ignore a warning sign that dramatic. Well, conservatives, too. But anyway…
So the Judge reasons that because life on Earth is so complicated, let us bring it back to simplicity by erasing all current life and begin again with the microbes. Obviously the heroic foursome do not want this to happen, so Janet enlists the help of a horde of other Janets. The Kill Switch is hidden in one Janet, the Judge goes into the voids of all the Janets before her. To clarify, a Janet (D’Arcy Carden) is a sort of servant that can bring both staff and residents in the places, good or bad, anything they wish. As well as having pretty much all of the knowledge in the universe. The void is where they go when they are not actively working. This opens up some comedic possibilities that are generally exploited to great effect. For example, there is a standard Janet for good and bad place alike. The Good Janet is generally the same as the Janet we mostly see in the rest of the series. The Bad Janet, on the other hand, is obnoxious and treats farts as punctuation. But other Janet variants exist, such as Disco Janet.
This prompts a funny sequence in which the Judge dances around to an old piece of shit song called Ring By Bell. However, in place of “you can ring my bell, ring my bell”, the Judge is singing “gonna erase the Earth, erase the Earth”. I promise, it is funnier on screen. But that, in a nutshell, is…
Look, people are always asking when. But if the bushfires, the fact that the war in Syria was partly prompted by access to water, or the fact that Greenland is melting into nonexistence, do not clue you into this, let me tell you. It is already happening.
Anyway, back to The Good Place. The creators of the series claim that they always had a four season arc in mind. That just does not jibe with what happens in the final season. The Judge sets an experiment in order to test Michael’s claim that Humans can keep changing and become worthy of the actual good place over their time in the afterlife. The (wanting to get into the) good place team is allowed to design the “neighbourhood” and select the populace of the plants, the people who are just things for the newly-deceased Humans to interact with. But the challenge comes from the bad place team being allowed to pick the newly-deceased Human subjects. They obviously use this to try and derail the experiment because they are the most creative bunch of complete bastards imaginable.
But then, halfway through the season, the show switches gears and the experiment is declared a success. Our heroes design a new afterlife system that sides good and bad can agree on. Everyone will go through a rehabilitation process designed to make them worthy of the good place. Said redesign is given a time limit, but the four heroes get through that in one or two episodes. Then the four heroes finally arrive at the actual good place and discover to their horror that the constant happy fun times are turning the residents into mindless, apathetic drones. The absence of (reasonable) challenge is turning the like of Plato into the like of Popeye. Who knew that would happen (hint: any good sociology or psychology student)? So then our four heroes design a new good place, one where, when the residents feel that they have done all they have needed to do and the ennui is setting, they can go through this portal and… nobody knows what will really happen. (There is an explanation available, but its impact on the story is non-existent and the fact that I had to read it in a web page is testament to how poorly communicated that explanation is.)
How did that sound? Like five stories all crammed into one? Like the show was cancelled and they had to wrap things up in a colossal hurry?
Look, I get it, Michael Schur. You want to save face and say that was your plan from the get-go. But unfortunately your ending and final season scream otherwise through a microphone connected to an amplifier the size of Jupiter. Nobody who knows enough about how the money and the series renewal system in the creative industries works believes you when you say this. Hell, nobody who felt the whiplish and confusion from the skeletally-structured wrap-up believes it. The final episode reeks of a desperate attempt to finish the story in as little time as is possible. (Yes, I know the final episode is over fifty minutes long, in contrast to the series’ average of twenty-two. But much like Peter Jackass Shits On Tolkien, too much story (I would guesstimate six hours’ worth with proper development time) is being crammed into far too little time.)
There is something I have not mentioned about the show yet. Season Three. Concerned with an experiment in seeing whether people can be steered into the appropriate behaviour to be worthy of the good place whilst alive, season three’s first few episodes are set in some warped and completely immersion-breaking idea of Asstralia. Look, this show is presumably set in the twenty-first century, right? No living adult soul in the twenty-first century is that uncritical and trusting. And nobody on Earth speaks like that.
Now, just let me be clear about this. Hate is a very strong word. People have overused it in present times to the extent that it is mistaken for a deep disliking, a contempt, or a disrespect. Hate means you would be comforted by seeing something or someone dead. And by comforted, I mean it brings you a peace that cannot be obtained in any other way. I prefer the word execration, or execrate. One source I found online defines execration as “the object execrated; a thing held in abomination”. An appropriate word for how I look at Asstralians, a society where child abuse is treated as discipline, where governments threaten to gut an attempt to solve a problem with disability poverty (namely, at more than 51 percent, the highest disability poverty rate in the world), where context is regarded by the justice system is utterly without import, is execration.
So when I tell you that no person or persons on the planet deserve to be portrayed like this, understand my full meaning.
Either way, I wonder how many viewers got sick of the urge to kick everyone working on those shots in the nethers and tuned out. Universal Television, the people most concerned with tracking the numbers, could not possibly have failed to notice that.
And I will be a little less aggressive with this statement. Once past season two, the show feels a little… padded. One could cut out the first nine episodes of Season Three, and with some corrective writing to bridge the narrative gap, nobody would notice the difference in storytelling terms. The kind of people who would be able to “get” The Good Place will actively notice this.
Others, well, it is like Plinkett says. You might not see it, but your brain did. The amount of factors that can unconsciously influence the opinion one has of a creative work are numerous. It would take me a long time to name every single film or series I saw on VHS or in standard definition and thought to be crap that then became anything from good to wonderful on Blu-ray Disc. That is not the most helpful example, but a sudden dip in writing quality is an example that pushes opinion in the other direction. Going from Have Spacesuit, Will Travel to a ten year old’s attempt to write about aliens. Imagine that change in writing quality and how you would react. Then take it down a handful of notches and you have the writing in seasons three and four of The Good Place.
Two things should be taken away from what I have just said. One, when your show gets cancelled after four seasons, do not profess to the world that you planned it that way. It raises a question. Who are you trying to convince. The audience? Or yourself? And for Odin’s sweet sake, do not tell people you planned hard once you had a second season when three and four are so padded. An exploration of the actual good place in more depth, its issues and the real challenges associated with being in a place that is all happiness all of the time (as opposed to just “hey, we found the answer in five minutes flat!”), just to name a few, would have been nice.
In fact, here is an idea that a good author (and me) can come up with whilst typing that sentence. Give every member of the Human group a (dead) person that they admire. Jason is a good place to get an example from. Whatever footballer he admires, was it Blake Bortles? Anyway, whomever Blake Bortles admired, or whomever that person admired, get Jason sitting down to have a chat with a (clearly impersonated) version of him. Let me use an example based on what would be happening if I were to wake up and find myself in the good place. Sitting in a lounge drinking tea and talking about character design with Philip K. Dick and Robert A. Heinlein. Or maybe someone I knew twenty years ago. A chat about philosophical points of being a musician with Cliff Burton, or a discussion of public image and acting manic with Keith Moon. See how easy this is to come up with? And then there is the idea of discussing what hope means to those without it.
So yeah, Michael Schur. Please do not insult us with claims that you ended the show in season four because you did not want to creatively tread water. You were drowning in the middle of season three. You owe other creatives better than that.
