The Good Place—A Good Show?

SPOILERS AHEAD—YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED

NBC has a plethora of comedic shows that are famous for their goofiness and TV-14 rating. The Good Place is one such show, except for one thing: it tackles the controversial and tricky topic of "what happens after death". Somehow, they manage to make it casual enough that it's enjoyable and doesn't cause existential crises in all fo their viewers.

I mean, I hope not.

While highly entertaining and rather addictive, this show clearly supports the idea that if you’re simply “a good person” during your time on earth, you get to go to “the Good Place”, aka ‘heaven’. The story follows a woman named Eleanor Shellstrop who was quite the pain when she was alive. She defended her trashy lifestyle and poor decisions to her awful childhood, and while pausing outside of a supermarket to insult an environmentalist, she gets pushed by a train of runaway carts into the street where she is hit by a freight truck. She wakes up in an office, and a mysterious man named Michael tells her she’s in the “Good Place”. Eleanor knows, however, that she did not lead a particularly worthy-of-praise life and tries to hide this fact from everyone in heaven. That is, except for her heaven-assigned “soulmate” by the name of Chidi Anagonye. He was an ethics professor on earth, and Eleanor convinces him to teach her ethics so she can blend in with all of the extraordinary do-gooders in the Good Place.

The logic behind the Good Place was explained in the very first episode, as a kind of initiation. In theory, every action one person did on earth was assigned either a positive or negative point value, depending on the amount of ‘good’ that one action put into the universe. Some example actions were used simply for comedic purposes, like ‘using ‘Facebook’ as a verb’ was assigned -40 points. The point was, the more good you did, the higher your ‘score’. By the time you died, if your score was in the +millions or more, you got to go the “Good Place”. Otherwise, you went to the “Bad Place”, which was a pretty graphic and exaggerated version of hell.

Eleanor somehow improves with Chidi’s help and forms a circle of friends who include a rich socialite who raised over 60 billion dollars for charity, and Buddhist monk who took a vow of silence on earth and continued to keep it in the Good Place. At the end of the first season, however, it is revealed that what they thought was the Good Place was actually the Bad Place, and the fact that Eleanor knew she wasn’t a good person was designed as a form of torture. Her friends also didn’t make it into the Good Place, for various reasons. The rest of the series follows their attempts to become better people in order to make it into heaven AFTER they have already died.

The point, ultimately, was, "be a very good person, don’t use ‘Facebook’ as a verb, and you’ll make it into heaven".

To the casual viewer, it makes sense. It's funny, it's about being a good person, and everyone likes it.

I mean, yes, it is enjoyable to some extent. But worth spending 54+ hours of your life on?

No, not really.

From the crude jokes to the flippant disregard of Christian beliefs and mindset, there are shows your mind would be better suited to consume.

That said, I've binged the whole series and think that with a discerning mind and an unwillingness to just blindly absorb content, there's nothing inherently wrong with watching The Good Place, as long as you're older than at least fourteen.

Like Lost in Space. Review of that amazing show to come.