The Good Place: All is Not What It Seems

The parallel worlds in The Good Place (there is also a “Medium Place” and a never-seen “Bad Place”) serve as the show’s central mystery. Showrunner/creator

Michael Schur noted at 2016’s Comic Con that Lost was a big inspiration for the series and that he consulted Lost showrunner/co-creator Damon Lindelof during development. Schur stepped away from his roots as a master of the comedic mundane, bringing humor to dry workplaces such as Parks and Recreation and

The Office, and instead this time created a high-concept, half-hour comedy. The series is serialized with contiguous episodes, and considers the philosophical question: What does it mean to be a good person?

In The Good Place, the portal is, of course, death. At first it seems to be a heaven-like “utopia” with frozen yogurt stands everywhere, a computer-like assistant who can fetch anything for you, and you can fly! However, The Good

Place soon becomes Eleanor’s (Kristen Bell) antagonist; she is constantly trying to fit in here, but whenever she messes up and falls into her past behaviors, it

!1 punishes her—whether by raining garbage on her or opening up a giant sinkhole in the hot new restaurant, “The Good Plate.”

The battle between The Good Place and Eleanor (and the rest of the gang) causes relationships to shift and the stakes to be raised constantly. Toward the end of Season 1, we discover that “The Good Place” is actually a new experimental afterlife where inhabitants are hand-selected to torture one another for eternity, i.e., hell. Schur and his writers engineered a smart, startling twist for the show, whose very premise turns out to be built on dystopia.

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