The Good Place

This article is a preview from the Winter 2018 edition of New Humanist

The Good Place opens with a nightmare. Eleanor Shellstrop, the main character of this sitcom made by NBC in the US and distributed via Netflix to the UK, dies in the first episode and wakes up in a kind of non-denominational heaven. An angel called Michael greets her, and assures her that through all her selfless good deeds on earth, she has more than qualified for an afterlife spent in this always sunny neighbourhood full of shops selling frozen yoghurt. There’s just one catch: Eleanor alone knows she was actually a bad person – she was drunk all the time, lied to her friends and worked in a call centre for a pharmaceutical pyramid scheme. Somehow, she has ended up in heaven by mistake, when she really belongs in the fiery alternative.

As the starting point for a sitcom, this isn’t all that promising. It’s far more complicated than the usual winning combination of “some people live together” (Friends), say, or “some people meet regularly in a bar” (Cheers). The very situation in The Good Place that is supposed be the basis for humour is a highly structured vision of the afterlife – so it’s no surprise that critics were initially sceptical. The show requires viewers to grasp its internal mythology quickly in order to appreciate the tension and humour as it develops, including a complex system of moral points, which humans accrue during their lives for good deeds and which ultimately determine whether they end up in “the good place” or “the bad place”. The show also relies heavily on narrative and character developments for laughs and momentum, which goes against TV tradition, too. Sitcoms from major networks are supposed to be about stasis, returning you cosily to the same place at the end of each episode. Instead, this is more like an unfolding sci-fi drama, as Eleanor learns more about the peculiarities of the “good place” and attempts to keep her own bad morals under wraps.

What prevents The Good Place coming across like a tortured, otherworldly drama like Westworld or Stranger Things is the fact that it is really, really funny. The dialogue is full of the kind of rapid-fire, surreal humour made popular by shows like Parks and Recreation and the US version of The Office – which isn’t that surprising, because both of these seminal 2000s comedies were produced by Michael Schur, who also created The Good Place. In interviews, Schur has talked about how much he likes working with a sitcom set in a fictional afterlife rather than in an actual workplace, because of how freeing it is creatively. “The goal in the first two seasons was to have at least one weird magical thing in every episode that could only happen in the afterlife,” he told Rolling Stone. Some of these elements include Janet, an all-knowing AI being who looks and sounds like a real human woman, and the landscape of heaven itself, which can change to reflect how inhabitants act (for instance, when Eleanor is particularly duplicitous, the weather turns terrible and natural disasters start occurring; giant shrimp also fly out of the sky on one occasion). According to all the accepted rules of television genres, The Good Place shouldn’t work. Except it does: the weekly broadcast in the US brings in millions of viewers, the Netflix transmission attracts many more internationally, and it is beloved by critics.

So how did a TV comedy about ethics and moral philosophy become so popular? Part of it is down to the show’s progression: after the initial plot set-up, The Good Place focuses on Eleanor’s desperate attempts to improve herself in the hope that she can avoid being ejected from heaven. She finds another inhabitant to help her, Chidi Anagonye, who was a professor of moral philosophy before his death and ascension to the good place. Together, they plough through most of the western philosophical canon, and although Eleanor frequently acts out or complains about the lessons, as the first series progresses we see her get interested in the subject despite herself. Boldly, the show actually incorporates their classes, blackboard and all, in the action rather than allowing the teaching to happen offscreen. The content of Chidi’s seminars is ambitious: they cover Kant’s categorical imperative and Thomas Scanlon’s work on contractualism, and pretty much everything else in between, in an attempt to give Eleanor a framework for starting to care about others more than herself. Again, it is the humour that carries these segments; at one point, Eleanor frustratedly exclaims “It’s like, who died and left Aristotle in charge of ethics?” to which Chidi smugly replies, “Plato!”

Later on, in the show’s second series, Michael joins the classes, and uses his otherworldly powers to inject a bit more realism into them. Rather than just studying the famous trolley problem – in which students must imagine they are driving a runaway trolley, and must decide whether to crash into and kill five people on one track or switch rails and only kill one person – he snaps his fingers and puts Chidi at the control of a very real-seeming vehicle. Over and over again they run the ethical experiment, and each time the characters get splattered in very realistic gore. This particular thought experiment is a mainstay of how philosophy is taught, and how it is portrayed in popular culture, because each alternative it offers allows us to test different philosophical concepts while also putting a personal dimension on these abstract ideas. Is it best to be a utilitarian, and just preserve the greatest number of lives? Or a consequentialist, where the driver’s motives matter more than than the actual outcome? What would you do when, like Chidi, the brake lever of the trolley is actually in your hands?

Part of the way philosophy is made amusing in this show is by combining the dissemination of these concepts with existing pop culture references. Thus Chidi is teased by Eleanor for his attempt to write a Hamilton-style rap musical about one of his favourite philosophers – “My name is Kierkegaard, and my writing is impeccable / check out my teleological suspension of the ethical” – and Michael often digests his own ethical dilemmas through plot points from Friends (which the humans he oversees have introduced him to).

By far the smartest part of The Good Place’s depiction of philosophy, however, was revealed at the end of series one. After a dozen episodes of believing that she is wrongly in heaven among exemplary people, Eleanor finally clocks onto the fact that she, and everyone else, is actually miserable. “Holy motherforking shirtballs!” she exclaims (swearing is not possible in the good place) as she realises that no heaven could be as twisted as the place she’s already in, where she’s constantly made to strive for a perfection she can never attain, and surrounded by people far superior to her. She’s already in the bad place, which has been designed to appear like heaven for the purpose of torturing humans with too much ego to think that maybe they were the villains all along. What we’ve been watching is actually a kind of Truman Show-esque prank show full of moral philosophical quandaries, in which Michael was a demon and the hellfire was psychological.

As well as being a brilliant plot twist, this reveal adds a whole new philosophical dimension to the show. The viewers have been delighting in The Good Place’s conflicts and tensions week after week, enjoying the way Eleanor makes Chidi anxious and how he makes her feel inferior. What does it say about us that we have found this scenario entertaining, in which people are made as miserable as possible for our amusement? Somehow, without being preachy or didactic, the writers have turned the show’s fundamental questions back onto the audience. What does it mean to live a good life? Even if the inspiration comes via a goofy sitcom, it’s still a question worth pondering.