Review: The Good Place
The laws of the universe are inviolable and unchanging. Comedy is shallow. Philosophy is boring. Or perhaps not? Maybe some things are not as set in stone as we might think. Enter: The Good Place.
The Good Place is a comedy series that ran from 2016 to 2020. Created by Michael Schur, who also co-created Parks and Recreation and Brooklyn 99, it comes from quite the pedigree. It also won roughly all of the awards. Naturally, this means I didn’t watch it until four years after its conclusion.
The premise of The Good Place is that, after dying, Eleanor seemingly finds herself in the titular Good Place. However, she quickly realises she actually should be in the Bad Place and has been confused with someone with the same name. The story follows Eleanor’s attempts to become a person actually deserving of being in the Good Place while avoiding being discovered as someone who shouldn’t be there.
Going forward, I’ll do my best to avoid spoilers, but read with caution nonetheless.
Narrative Complexity
It’s commonly understood that comedies are shallow and full of cheap laughs of little substance. While this certainly is true of a lot of comedic media, it isn’t always the case. The Good Place proves this by having a complex story and deep characters while still delivering on its humour.
The Good Place explores philosophical concepts that can be difficult to answer. Can a bad person change their ways and become good? Is humanity inherently good or evil? What makes a person bad? Do people who have wronged deserve a second chance? Those are the four primary questions explored by the show. That’s already a lot to unpack, but there’s many secondary questions asked by The Good Place as well.
The Good Place isn’t just putting all these questions out into the aether either. It makes a point of exploring the nuances of those questions and eventually coming to its own conclusions. The Good Place establishes that matters of morality are complex and only becoming more so as the world itself gets more and more complicated to navigate. It acknowledges that even those of us with the best intentions can do harm to the world. However, it also establishes that you can always make the effort to do better.
An element that I also thoroughly enjoyed is that The Good Place understands that our morality isn’t just something innate. The way we behave also has a lot to do with our surroundings and the environments we grew up in. It doesn’t treat these things as excuses for poor behaviour, but acknowledges the part outside influences have to play on the end result. It also shows us that you can choose to do right despite these circumstances if you’re willing to put the effort in.
More impressively still, The Good Place does all of this through a lens of genuine philosophical concepts incorporated into a plot that is full of surprising and captivating twists and turns. By willingly abandoning one of its central conceits, The Good Place is able to continue for four seasons without ever getting stale. Each season dramatically changes the status quo, using those changes and shake-ups as means to explore those aforementioned philosophical quandaries.
Compelling Characters
The plot isn’t the only element of the story with complexity either. The Good Place maintains a fairly small central cast with a handful of additional supporting characters. This means that the story has plenty of room to thoroughly explore its characters. As an audience, we spend plenty of time with each of the six main characters as we learn why they are the way they are, explore their flaws and watch them strive to overcome those flaws and change. It makes for extremely compelling viewing.
Through Eleanor and Michael, we see characters develop empathy and understanding of the world around them with the two forming interesting foils to each other. Through Jason we watch a character struggle with impulse control and learn to work on his lack of restraint for the sake of others. With Tahani we explore how one’s motivations relate to their morality. And with Chidi, we get the other side of that, seeing how having the best of intentions can still lead to negative results and how inaction is functionally the same as negative action.
However, perhaps the most surprisingly standout character is Janet. Janet goes through immense character development from her initial appearance as effectively Siri with legs to a fully formed person exploring her own thoughts and feelings. As the seasons progress, we get to watch Janet become a fully realised person.
The characters in The Good Place are quirky and comedic but also captivating and multi-faceted. They provide a perfect example of how characters in a comedy can still be zany and outlandish without sacrificing the layers that make them compelling to watch.
Light-Hearted Tone
One of the things that makes The Good Place stand out so much is that it does everything I just talked about above without ever really compromising on its tone. As with any bit of media, the mood in The Good Place has its ups and downs. However, the overall tone is never sacrificed. The Good Place remains lighthearted and positive even during some of its darkest and saddest moments, never forgetting to bring the laughter even when its audience is on the verge of tears. That creates a special atmosphere that is hard to replicate.
On top of that, despite the lofty themes it explores, The Good Place also remains down-to-Earth and accessible. The philosophy it explores is always presented to the audience in a palatable and easy to understand way - often presented through comedy. The Good Place is never conceited or written to be incomprehensible to the average person. This contributes greatly to the general mood of the series and elevates it in ways pretension never could.
The Good Place proves that tragedy can be funny, you can have depth without being grim or pretentious and that you can balance humour and bittersweetness for a wonderfully poignant result.
Pacing Problems
Now, before I get into this, I do want to be clear, most of The Good Place does not have any major pacing issues. Seasons one and two are executed pretty much perfectly and while season four isn’t quite as spot-on, it's still exceedingly good. The Good Place also has the important distinction of not overstaying its welcome. It prioritised having a compelling and complete story over having more seasons and it was better for it.
That being said, it wouldn’t be a fair review if I didn’t acknowledge the one real issue with the show. The pacing in season three is not up to the same standard as the seasons before or the one that follows. It feels like the primary story arc of season three is rushed through and the newly expanded cast of characters aren’t really given enough time to breathe on their own. It feels like we see very little progress narratively over several episodes and then, abruptly, the season’s climax is upon us and it feels a bit like whiplash. Similarly, the newly expanded cast of characters often feels like they aren’t given quite enough attention. They aren’t the main characters but, given how important they are to the core cast of six, the show would have benefited a bit from giving them more room to be explored.
In Conclusion
In my opinion, comedy is one of the hardest things to write. Humour is extremely subjective even at the lowest common denominator. Writing a comedy with depth and nuance is even harder. Despite this, The Good Place tackles some extremely complicated philosophical and moral questions and sticks the landing.
The Good Place might have a few small blips throughout, but it is by and large an extremely well crafted show with a consistent continuity and internal logic, a compelling cast of characters and a complex and layered narrative. More impressively still, it does all this while still being both clever and hilarious all while maintaining a genuineness and heart that a lot of other media lacks.
My biggest regret about watching The Good Place is that I won’t be able to experience it for the first time again. My second is that I didn’t watch it sooner when everyone else was, so there’s fewer people around to talk about it at length with.
If that doesn’t speak to how good the show is, I don’t know what does.
