The Good Place is the most unexpectedly profound show on television. NBC’s afterlife sitcom, which just concluded its second season, stars Kristen Bell as an impostor in paradise and Ted Danson as her supernatural overseer. It begins by skewering shallowly sentimental ideas of heaven and then transitions to asking (sincerely!) how a bad person can become good. You know the show is something special when the Kierkegaard jokes start and don’t let up.
Bell plays a selfish woman named Eleanor Shellstrop who’s let into “The Good Place” by mistake and realizes she has to learn ethics to blend in. Danson’s unearthly architect Michael introduces Eleanor to her unearned eternal reward, a bourgeois bohemian paradise of manicured lawns and frozen yogurt stores on every corner. The ostensible moral basis of this afterlife is an absurd Pelagian system: If you “Remember Sister’s Birthday” you gain 15.02 points, but to “Ruin an Opera with Boorish Behavior” loses you 90.90 points.
Those who come out ahead in this reckoning are rewarded with houses in the eternal suburb and assigned a singular “soulmate”—just as Hallmark piety would expect. Eleanor’s supposed soulmate is ethics professor Chidi (William Jackson Harper), a sweet nerd who agrees to keep Eleanor’s secret and to teach her how actually to become the good person she’s impersonating. Their under-the-radar ethics classes become entangled with the shenanigans of another impostor, a Jacksonville Jaguars fan posing as a Buddhist monk, Jason (Manny Jacinto), and his supercilious celebutante soulmate Tahani (Jameela Jamil). Rounding out the cast is the neighborhood’s Siri-like, programmed, all-purpose assistant Janet (D’Arcy Carden). The show is a wacky ensemble comedy even as it’s an earnest exploration of moral development.
Showrunner Michael Schur (a co-creator of Parks and Recreation and Brooklyn Nine-Nine) has blogged about the ethical struggles he’s faced in his life, some of which have their own sitcom-like quality. Example: In 2005, Schur’s fiancée rear-ended a Saab, leaving it with an all-but-invisible scratch on its bumper. The Saab’s driver wanted to file an insurance claim for the scratch. To dissuade him from filing a claim—which might have raised insurance rates for Schur’s fiancée—Schur promised to donate to a Hurricane Katrina relief fund, then started roping in his friends to donate as well, as a way of shaming the unnamed “Saab guy.” But Schur began to have moral qualms about his actions, and spent hours on the phone with Harvard, Yale, and Stanford ethics professors to talk through the situation.
Someone inclined to concoct a plot like this—and then to noodle nervously over its morality—has just the sort of mind well suited to putting TV characters into sticky situations. Although Schur says he consulted ethics professors in 2005, he never mentions seeking religious guidance. Nevertheless, in The Good Place he’s made a show that explores and then explodes “moralistic therapeutic deism,” the mushy, post-Christian pseudo-religion of America’s youth diagnosed by sociologists Christian Smith and Melinda Lundquist Denton. Moralistic therapeutic deism posits that God wants you to be happy but otherwise stays out of the way and that nice people go to heaven when they die. The Good Place starts off as a Technicolor Divine Comedy for the therapeutic deist universe. The twists of the show suggest Schur is well aware of the extent to which this worldview is lame and saccharine. (Ye who enter here: Major spoilers follow.)
By the first-season finale, the human characters’ deceptions are found out and a stern judge tells them they must choose two of their number to go to “The Bad Place.” As they debate and bicker, Eleanor realizes that they are torturing each other with their faults and foibles. This isn’t “The Good Place” at all, and Michael is a demon pulling a No Exit on them. It’s a brilliant moment, because it upends audience expectations and retroactively makes this sappy, chichi heaven a satire of our impoverished imaginings of eternal bliss.
Where can a show go after revealing its characters are in hell? Only up. Eleanor’s quest to become good causes Michael to have a crisis of conscience. Soon, he joins Chidi’s ethics classes and begins hatching a scheme with his erstwhile torturees to put one over on his fellow demons and stage a breakout for the real Good Place. The show sings as its morally ramshackle characters try to wrap their heads around different philosophies of good and evil. In one episode, when Michael leans toward using murder to solve a problem, a distraught Chidi tries to explain the doctrine of double effect to him. Briefly, the doctrine is that one may undertake a morally neutral act, knowing two effects will likely come of it, one good and one bad, only if one intends the good effect and does not intend the bad as either an end or a means—St. Thomas Aquinas applied it to using violence in self-defense. The recovering demon parses Chidi’s lesson to mean he should do what he was going to do, “and it sure would be terrible if that ultimately led to Derek’s death, wink.” (He says the word “wink” out loud.) This is a reaction that’s laughably familiar to anyone who has tried to clarify what the doctrine of double effect really is to someone who wants it to justify any desired immoral action.
One whole episode is spent running variations on the famous “trolley problem,” the allegedly ethics-clarifying hypothetical that asks you to decide how you would act if an out-of-control trolley were on course to run over several people. Would you pull a lever to direct the trolley if it meant it would run over only one person? Would you push a person into the trolley’s path? Chidi first explains the problem by diagramming the thought experiment on a blackboard, but a nettled Michael, resentful of being taught by a human, hijacks the lesson and plunges Chidi into a hyperreal simulation in which he’s soaked in cartoonish blood whichever choice he makes.
Bioethicist Elizabeth Yuko wrote for the Atlantic that The Good Place’s trolley problem episode “allows the experiment to surface in multiple forms, helpfully reinforcing the notion that there is, in fact, no single correct answer, and many ways of thinking through the question.” But the show does not in fact make the ethical shrug Yuko imputes to it. Michael’s use of the trolley problem represents his briefly backsliding into torturing Chidi, suggesting there is something demonic about the trolley problem itself, or at least about the utilitarian interpretations that make it a numbers game—as if any evil can be made good if a malicious mastermind adds enough arbitrary consequences to refraining from evil. The trolley problem is one of those edge cases so sharp it’ll cut you. When it is referenced later in the season, it is to show how Michael has grown beyond it. He muses, as he takes a self-sacrificial action, that he has solved the trolley problem. This is a solid point based in virtue ethics: A person with a well-formed conscience will resist or escape the constraints of an immoral dichotomy, to the point of giving up his or her own life.
Although the show has been airing on broadcast TV, it is also clearly written with the streaming—and even binge-watching—audience in mind, with each episode flowing immediately into the next and the characters evolving over the course of the show. The show’s writing on philosophy is smart, although not completely consistent; Chidi, the adorably geeky, indecisive ethics professor, does seem to swing wildly between utilitarianism and deontology as the plot demands. However, the very fact this is a relevant critique of a sitcom illustrates the show’s earnest, ethical themes. Because the showrunner cares about Eleanor learning to be a less selfish and more altruistic person, we the viewers care as well. For all the ways Eleanor’s sleazy behavior and poor impulse control make her a hilarious center of the show’s humor, it’s her character arc toward accepting responsibility and receiving love that makes The Good Place captivating and consistently enjoyable.
The second-season finale, which again takes the show in an unexpected direction, offers a mix of insight and inanity. The heavenly bureaucracy still seems capricious rather than wise. But Eleanor’s journey has taken her past the trite idea that “Hell is other people” to an understanding that she can’t become a better person by sheer willpower. For that, she needs others’ love, instruction, and support—even of a supernatural kind. By progressing from parodying popular pictures of paradise to entertaining real moral debate, The Good Place has backed into the idea of divine grace—specifically, prevenient grace, the kind we have to receive as a gift before we can desire the good. And who knows: Maybe next season we will find out that the show is all taking place in Purgatory—not a vaguely limbo-ish place (as in the finale of Lost) but a sin-expurgating, growing-in-sanctity place made by God for us wayward souls groping toward the light.
Alexi Sargeant is a theater director and culture critic who writes from New York.
