"The Good Place" To End with Upcoming Season 4 [Archive] - Sitcoms Online Message Boards

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01-30-2020, 10:24 PM

The Good Place managed to stay great because it cared more about its characters than plot twists (https://www.theringer.com/tv/2020/1/30/21113933/the-good-place-series-finale-mystery-box-michael-schur)

The Michael Schur NBC comedy, which ends its four-season run tonight, kept viewers on their toes after the big Season 1 reveal. Yet unlike other mystery box shows like Mr. Robot and Westworld, The Good Place never cared about topping itself. "Despite unleashing one of the most impressive plot twists in recent memory, The Good Place has continued to operate in service of its philosophical base and characters rather than try to pull the rug out from under us for a second time, and possibly fail," says Miles Surrey. "What’s driven The Good Place hasn’t been any ill-fated attempt to outsmart its audience, but the growth of its characters in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds. After being placed in an experiment designed to have them torture one another, Eleanor, Chidi, Jason, and Tahani have instead charted a path toward self-improvement through ethics lessons, owning up to their flaws, and seeing the fundamental decency in just about anything. Even Michael, who went from gleefully torturing his human subjects to becoming their biggest ally, has become a better, uh, demon—his journey feels like a natural extension of the show’s 'finding the good in everyone' storytelling. Not to repeatedly dunk on Westworld, but that show set up a similar path to enlightenment—robots living in their own eternal hell loop before rebelling against their demonic human overlords—but failed to maintain emotional investment; too many characters were left intentionally inscrutable. (Some humans are revealed as robots, all Anthony Hopkins did was creepily quote Shakespeare, etc.) The Good Place has never lost sight of what matters—its characters—and never sidelined that in favor of more disorienting plot machinations. All told, The Good Place is telling an engaging story on its own terms, and enjoying the series for the past three seasons hasn’t required fans to scour Reddit for the latest theories."

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How The Good Place mastered the mystery box (https://observer.com/2020/01/good-place-series-finale-air-date-time-preview/): "Too often, series with lots of twists set up each new big reveal despite eroding our interest in the story and characters," says Brandon Katz, adding: "Mystery boxes ironically end up leaving creatives boxed into an unwinnable shell game in which audiences are inevitably dissatisfied with the answers or burnt out on guessing games. The Good Place executed a perfect Season 1 twist but never attempted to one-up itself in subsequent seasons. Instead, it kept things interesting by creatively clearing the table with memory wipes and timeline reboots ('Jeremy Bearimy' should be taught in film school as an example of prime exposition) while further focusing on the mission of our characters: self-improvement, even after death. In doing so, The Good Place achieved the ideal mix of great characters who acknowledge their flaws and grow as individuals and an entertaining plot that never bent over backwards to recreate early magic."
It's baffling that The Good Place decided to do a quasi-reset for Season 4 (https://www.gq.com/story/the-good-place-has-one-episode-left-to-stick-the-landing): "For a show that has worked so earnestly to make the argument that people can grow and change, it saddled itself with some distinctly unpromising new test subjects, including a smarmy male chauvinist and a needlessly cruel gossip columnist," says Scott Meslow. "The Good Place isn’t beyond telling a redemption story—this is, after all, a series that utterly redeemed an unrepentant demon—but the series never really bothered to turn these new cartoon characters into human beings, and it ultimately just sort of hand-waved them off the stage altogether."
Words matter on The Good Place (https://www.theringer.com/tv/2020/1/29/21112483/the-good-place-use-of-language-michael-schur): "The show has given us endless food puns and a host of new curse words, but there’s also always been deeper meaning hidden in its language," says Jack McCluskey, adding: "The Good Place argues that what you do matters, that actions have consequences—intentional and unintentional—and that things that appear to be black-and-white often are, on closer inspection, many shades of gray. And if choices matter, then the language of a show about why choices matter must also matter."
What it's like to serve as The Good Place's art director (https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2020/01/good-place-art-director-why-heaven-is-the-getty/605482/): Adam Rowe, who assumed the art director job in Season 3, implements the ideas of the showrunners, directors, and production designer by working with set decorators, costume managers, props masters, visual-effects producers, and others. "Season 3 was so adventurous and fun and was moving around a lot. And Season 4 was interesting and beautiful, but it’s a totally different show, because (the characters) are not moving like they were in 3," says Rowe. "This season we were doing a lot of things that were established in Season 1, Season 2, and Season 3: It was like a greatest hits. We were pulling out a lot of things from storage, or reaching around to find the thing that was lost in Season 2, or we were like, 'Oh, okay, we gotta remake this.'" Rowe also says The Good Place really didn't do much with their heaven filming location, Los Angeles' Getty art museum "because the architecture speaks for itself."
In what ways did The Good Place evolve that surprised creator Michael Schur? (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/28/arts/television/the-good-place-michael-schur.html): "Well, there was a gigantic evolution of what the show actually believed, which was interesting," Schur tells The New York Times. "I wrote this long document to all the writers at the beginning that laid out the stuff I’d been reading and the basic ideas we’d be discussing. And I wrote a note that basically said, “At some point this show needs to figure out what it believes. There’s a lot of theories out there and they’ve been discussed for thousands of years, and if things work out and we stick around long enough, the show has to take a position. But I didn’t know what that position was going to be. So what ended up happening was by writing the stories and figuring out what interested us as a group, the show ended up having a philosophy about what matters. And that was really fun — it felt like a four-year conversation among a lot of really smart and funny people about what’s the best way to just approach the impossibility of being alive. And that was delightful."
Manny Jacinto and William Jackson Harper on being kept in the dark on the Season 1 twist (https://tv.avclub.com/manny-jacinto-and-william-jackson-harper-on-the-after-1841164429): "We had no clue where the first season was going. Which was probably for the best because we probably would have spoiled it right then and there," says Jacinto. "At the time, it was one of those things where we were being asked to talk in-depth about something that we were really, really unfamiliar with," adds Harper. "I was trying to answer questions and not appear to be aloof, but I just really didn’t know anything."
D'Arcy Carden on the final day of filming (https://www.newsweek.com/good-place-series-finale-season-4-janet-darcy-carden-1484683): "It was emotionally as high and low as could be," she says. "It was loving a group of people so much and feeling so proud of the work that we've done and feeling like this should go on forever or at least a couple more years even though we knew it was good we ended on our own terms. I remember on the last day, again in a van, the cast was driving to our location. I was a little emotional and I made everybody go around the van and recall when we each met each other for the first time. It was pretty sweet, everybody was feeling very, lovey and nostalgic. There was a lot of hand holding."
Jameela Jamil's advisory for watching the series finale: "I would recommend having some tissues ready" (https://parade.com/980865/debrawallace/jameela-jamil/)
What is the worst thing about the Bad Place? (https://www.theringer.com/tv/2020/1/28/21110896/the-good-place-finale-bad-place-details)
Here are nine Good Place series finale predictions, from least likely to most likely to happen (https://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2020/01/the-good-place-series-finale.html)
Read a tribute to Stupid Nick’s Wing Dump, which is both a fictional Florida eatery and a perfect collection of words (https://uproxx.com/tv/stupid-nicks-wing-dump-the-good-place/)
Presenting the best of The Good Place's Florida jokes (https://www.tampabay.com/arts-entertainment/2020/01/29/15-times-the-good-place-made-hilarious-fun-of-florida/)
Ranking all 42 The Good Place characters from worst to best (https://www.vulture.com/article/the-good-place-characters-ranked.html)

The Good Place series finale "delivered on the feels" (https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/tv/what-did-the-good-place-teach-us-that-even-eternal-bliss-needs-a-happy-ending/2020/01/31/e64c3342-4373-11ea-aa6a-083d01b3ed18_story.html)

"The task of writing a suitable farewell for NBC’s one-of-a-kind comedy The Good Place is like being handed a blank blue book for the final essay exam in a freshman philosophy course," says Hank Stuever. "What did we learn about the meaning of life? (And what didn’t we learn?) What can we say about human nature and the choices we make? And do those choices affect everything else? Is the universe keeping score? You have one hour and 45 minutes. Cite examples." Thursday's series finale, says Stuever, "lacked the knifey wit and rapid-fire momentum that defined The Good Place, but it delivered on the feels. These tender tendencies are not to be underestimated in today’s comedies. It’s why people can’t stop watching Jim and Pam fall in love on reruns of The Office, where Good Place creator Michael Schur, a sort of high-functioning iconoclast in the network TV world, once worked as a writer, before co-creating Parks and Recreation and Brooklyn Nine-Nine. These shows (and their tonal cousins, such as Superstore and Schitt’s Creek) act as fuzzy blankets for an audience that prizes warmth and reassurance as much as the biting wit. It’s a carefully calibrated, salty-sweet balance between the snarky and the emotional. It’s the digs, followed by the hugs." Even though The Good Place's first episodes felt a tad too twee, it "was a small miracle in the noisy, doomed atmosphere of our particular End Times," says Stuever. "It was a gentle way to ponder our reason for being here...Beyond its final attempt to pluck its viewers’ easily-plucked heartstrings, I hope The Good Place’s legacy is one of inquiry, rumination and, most of all, a healthy dose of doubt. Dunked as we are in candy-coated artifice and carefully crafted lies, our world needs more Eleanors, willing to stand up and say that we’re all being duped."

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Michael Schur stuck the landing with a 90-minute delight of a finale (https://tv.avclub.com/the-good-place-goes-through-one-last-door-leaving-us-a-1841371930): "I expected to cry all through this finale as soon as I saw its title was, 'Whenever You’re Ready,'" says Dennis Perkins. "I sensed, rightly as it turns out, that this would be an extra-long series of goodbyes to and from some of the most endearing, heroic, hilarious, and beautifully realized characters I’d ever seen on TV, and, well, I’m a crier. But Michael Schur and his architects have always, it turns out, understood exactly what they were doing here in this dippy, deep, soulful, and eternally surprising series."
The Good Place left behind no unfinished business (https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-good-place-finale-leaves-behind-no-unfinished-business): "The risk of a show like The Good Place, with all its twists and turns, can be that the proceedings lose their stakes," says Laura Bradley. "In this show’s case, however, that was never a problem; the stakes in this world feel both epic and nonexistent anyway. The lack of tension in this series is, in many ways, part of the appeal—so in the end, of course there would be no casualties of time. In The Good Place, there are no missed connections, and there are no loose ends. Although death remains predictable in this world, it’s merely a step to the other side—where everyone still has the time to put their affairs in absolute order, if they are willing to work for that time."
Like the Parks and Recreation finale, The Good Place's ending was more like an epilogue (https://www.rollingstone.com/tv/tv-recaps/good-place-series-finale-recap-945242/): "Because The Good Place has always been about the entire moral and metaphysical human experience, following Eleanor and some of the others to the end of that experience — and seeing Michael at the start of his own version of it — feels like the true ending of things, even after the Good and Bad Places got fixed by Team Cockroach," says Alan Sepinwall.
The Good Place finale refused to take the easy way out (https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/tv/story/2020-01-30/la-et-st-the-good-place-finale-review-ted-danson-kristen-bell)
Michael Schur was more successful sticking the landing with The Good Place than he was with Parks and Rec (https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/tv/2020/01/30/the-good-place-series-finale-review-recap/4596629002/)
Schur finds it ironic that The Good Place is his most streaming-friendly series yet (https://mashable.com/article/good-place-finale-michael-schur-interview-streaming/): "The ironic thing is that The Good Place was designed as a way to do an old timey, heavily serialized cliffhanger show that drove live viewership," he says, adding: "I tried to do one thing and ended up doing the opposite. It appears to be a sort of fool's errand to try to predict how any of this stuff is going to affect people and how it will change how they watch."
Schur talks philosophers, from the one The Good Place writers spent the most time discussing to the most impenetrable (https://ew.com/tv/2020/01/30/the-good-place-finale-mike-schur-looks-back-on-four-seasons/)
The cast sat with Seth Meyers for a live show just one night after watching the series finale for the first time (https://deadline.com/2020/01/the-good-place-aftershow-series-finale-1202846321/)
Ted Danson expects The Good Place to have a long afterlife (https://variety.com/video/ted-danson-the-good-place-ending/): "I really feel genuinely that I was a part of something very special," he says. "It’s a very special show and it’s not going to go away because another group of 12-year-olds will come up and want to see it and their parents will want them to see it. It’s a lovely thing, a lovely messaged, a little gift.”
Kristen Bell on the concept that hit her the hardest in the series finale (https://ew.com/tv/2020/01/31/the-good-place-finale-kristen-bell/): "The fact that once you have everything you’re striving so hard to earn, it’s still not enough," she says. "That what you need to earn is the acceptance of the complex internal decision to let go. It was so beautiful how they made everybody mush in the Good Place because it’s true."
Michael Schur would rather not explain the series finale (https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/live-feed/good-place-series-finale-explained-mike-schur-interview-1275060): "The show has always taken these big swings in finales, and unlike other shows I've worked on, I just like ending the season and putting out whatever the big idea was … and letting it be for a little while," Schur told The Hollywood Reporter on Thursday morning, hours before the finale aired (NBC did not send the finale to critics and reporters in advance). "I would rather it go out in the world and rattle around a little bit before I jump in and start yelling and screaming about why we did what we did."

The Good Place left behind the feeling that it was a metaphor for television (https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2020/01/good-place-michael-schur-finale-metaphor-television/605884/)

"What I kept coming back to over the course of 'Whenever You’re Ready,' Thursday night’s transcendent one-hour finale, was how much The Good Place also functioned as a metaphor for television itself, with its godlike creators, its capricious fans (Maya Rudolph’s Judge Gen foremost among them), its formulaic constraints, and its inherent potential," says Sophie Gilbert. "Both the secret hell-dimension of the Good Place and the comedy The Good Place begin with the premise of four entirely dissimilar people being brought together in a place that they believe is heaven. Eleanor (played by Kristen Bell) is an 'Arizona dirtbag' whose higher purpose on Earth began and ended with tequila and celebrity-baby plastic-surgery magazines. Chidi (William Jackson Harper) is a pathologically indecisive moral-philosophy professor. Tahani (Jameela Jamil) is a name-dropping socialite obsessed with luxury and status. Jason (Manny Jacinto) is a Floridian doofus defined by his love for wings, Molotov cocktails, and the Jacksonville Jaguars. In the Good Place and in their roles as TV characters, these people are supposed to torture one another for the entertainment of the people watching—their demon overlords, and us, the viewers at home. It’s the setup of sitcoms and reality shows since time immemorial: Put some contrasting characters or odd couples together and watch them drive one another crazy. When The Good Place revealed its big twist at the end of Season 1, the show got more interesting but also more meta. How would heaven reboot itself? Could the series function outside its carefully constructed premise? What might happen without the specific formula of the original configuration?"

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It's a miracle that The Good Place thrived within the constraints of network TV (https://slate.com/culture/2020/01/the-good-place-series-finale-review-whenever-youre-ready.html): "With its endless reboots and play-acting demons, The Good Place was as much a show about TV shows as it was about the mysteries of the universe," says Sam Adams. "One of its underlying questions was whether we can inch our way towards enlightenment by replaying the same scenarios over and over again, or whether real change involves ripping everything up and starting afresh. As a network sitcom—perhaps the last great one—the show was inherently incrementalist, bound to commercial breaks and setup-joke structures, although there were stretches of the last season when humor took a distant backseat to heart. But as virtually all of TV’s creative energy drifts in the direction of cable and streaming, the show’s dedication to working within those constraints—its insistence that you could make something meaningful and distinctive and still send it out over the airwaves for free—was in itself a small act of moral generosity."
The series finale rescued a frustrating final season (https://ew.com/tv-reviews/2020/01/31/the-good-place-finale-review/): Michael Schur is "an optimist who believes the sweetness of his characters will be rewarded," says Darren Franich. "His masterpiece Parks & Recreation wrapped on a success-for-everybody flash-forward: best-selling authorhood, mayoralty, a governorship, maybe a presidency? In that spirit, I think The Good Place cut some corners when it became a catharsis-of-the-week redemption procedural. A sisterhood was redeemed, a fractured mother-daughter relationship started to heal, old love was reformed through various amnesias. Like the philosophers say: You can’t save Donkey Doug, but at least you can save Pillboi. Actually, the finale revealed, you can save Donkey Doug. You can save everyone!"
It feels cheap to say that the final twist of The Good Place is there is no twist (https://www.vulture.com/2020/01/the-good-place-finale-ending.html): "But there’s something lovely and right about the show’s decision to abandon its twisting mechanisms and accept the obvious," says Kathryn VanArendonk. "It has always been two kinds of mystery at once: A puzzle-box mystery that continually offered up solutions to new problems, doling out “aha!” moments of revelation and then immediately producing the next puzzle to be solved; and a John Donne, key-to-all-mythologies, epistemological kind of mystery. Why are we here? What happens after we die? What is the nature of goodness? While The Good Place pulled off the structure of its puzzle box remarkably well, the reality is that there could never be a satisfying answer to its second mystery that was not also deeply obvious. There’s no answer to 'What is the nature of goodness?' that could be surprising, and there’s no answer to 'What happens after we die?' that could ever be truly satisfying."
The series finale was hard to accept (https://nerdist.com/article/the-good-place-finale-why-i-cant-accept/): "It didn’t work for me because they were ... given something we never will," says Michael Walsh. "They had a choice, and they had a choice to never go through that door. I can’t believe any of them did. I found no hope in the show’s ideal version of death, because I know there’s no such thing. We can’t escape the pain others feel when people leave us, and we can’t spare them the same when we go. Fortunately I will always find hope in The Good Place‘s message that we are not alone. It’s the idea that gives me comfort and meaning and purpose when those are hardest for me to find, especially when I think about those who are no longer with me."
The Good Place stuck the landing by tying up the macro so it could devote the finale to the macro (https://www.theringer.com/tv/2020/1/31/21116659/the-good-place-finale): "Endings are, for better or for worse, when shows reveal their true priorities," says Alison Herman. "In the past year, we’ve gotten a whole lot of them—some better received than others, all indicative of what their series had become. Game of Thrones was a slapdash race to the finish line; Orange Is the New Black was an unwieldy yet earnest bait-and-switch; Catastrophe was all the more romantic for how f*cked up its central romance was. The Good Place tied up the macro so it could spend its final minutes in the micro, where it’s always belonged. The show was hardly disingenuous in its exploration of ethics, moral philosophy, and the guiding principles of a just society. It just understood that these broader concepts are an aggregate of a far more granular one: That people can be narcissistic, indecisive, arrogant, or impulsive, but they can also learn and grow when given the chance. I’ll raise one last margarita to that."
The Good Place was always about the little things (https://uproxx.com/tv/good-place-finale-take-it-sleazy/): "The interesting thing is that the show pulled it off by zagging instead of zigging, by giving us the old okie-doke, by going small instead of big. It was never really about those big questions," says Brian Grubb. "It was about the characters attempting to grapple with them, and the little things that made up those big things."
The Good Place has often made us cry over the years, so to go out with a well-placed snort and giggle is kind and magical (https://www.salon.com/2020/01/31/the-good-place-finale-ending-review/)
What made the finale so great was its gentle acceptance of death (https://www.vox.com/culture/2020/1/31/21116261/the-good-place-series-finale-recap-whenever-youre-ready-season-4-door)
The series finale was both totally surprising, yet totally predictable (https://www.polygon.com/2020/1/31/21115997/good-place-finale-review-recap-michael-schur-parks-and-recreation-lost)
Good Place stars reveal what souvenirs they took from the set (https://www.eonline.com/news/1118134/the-items-the-good-place-cast-took-from-set-will-bring-a-tear-to-your-eye): Ted Danson took home the wallet Janet gave him featuring pictures of the cast
The Good Place series finale secrets revealed (https://tvline.com/2020/01/31/the-good-place-series-finale-explained-podcast-michael-song/): Ron Swanson did not appear in Thursday's finale and a full version of Michael’s psychedelic tune “The Purple Train to Groovy City” was actually recorded.

Kristen Bell has found her own Good Place having not acted on camera since filming The Good Place finale last September (https://www.rollingstone.com/tv/tv-features/good-place-finale-kristen-bell-interview-947122/)

"One thing this show has done for me is really helped me value my life a lot more," Bell told Rolling Stone days after last Thursday's series finale. "I thought I valued it before, but I’ve been incredibly content since the show has ended. Previously — and maybe having kids growing up has something to do with this — I would run from job to job, worrying that if I waited one more moment, I would become irrelevant. But since September, I have really just been a mom, and I have loved it. There’s not a part of me that feels unfulfilled. I’m still working a little bit. I do a voiceover on an Apple show coming out in May called Central Park, and a voice on an Amazon kids show coming out in December called Do, Re & Mi. Morgan Sackett, the producer of The Good Place, and I started a production company that’s been making some commercials, and making an entity called The Tiny Chef alongside Imagine, but I’m not on camera. And I am totally fine with it. In the mornings, I wake up with my kids, I take them to school, I’m done at 9:30. I do work at my computer until 2:30, I pick them up, I make dinner, and I live a very Beaver Cleaver lifestyle with my family. That is, if Beaver Cleaver was into off-roading, which is a little bit more our family."

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The Good Place's two philosophy professor consultants discuss their series finale cameos (https://slate.com/culture/2020/02/the-good-place-finale-ending-explained-philosopher-cameos-analysis.html)
The Good Place was the perfect antidote to the Trump era (https://www.themarysue.com/the-good-place-was-the-perfect-antidote-to-the-trump-era/)
Listen to Chidi's full Kierkegaard rap (https://io9.gizmodo.com/william-jackson-harper-has-one-last-good-place-lesson-i-1841417360)

Ted Danson on The Good Place's finale: I got to experience sadness along with my character (https://ew.com/tv/2020/02/13/the-good-place-ted-danson-finale/)

"First off, we had the luxury of knowing that we were saying goodbye for the entire year that we were shooting the show," Danson tells EW. "Mike (Schur) knew that he would have told the story by the end of the season, and he didn’t want to vamp, he wanted to do it the way he envisioned it from the very beginning. So that was lovely. You got to be sad in real time and appreciate and celebrate the fact that we are all together doing this amazing show, because a lot of times you get cancelled when you thought you were going to be back. So the actual goodbye was not as sad. For me, the sadness of the actor and the sadness of the character saying goodbye kind of coincided, so it was kind of this wonderful, sweet, sad acting and also, you know, real life. By the time we watched the final show and did that whole final episode thing, it was just sweet, it wasn’t really even sad. The takeaway — there are so many little messages or thoughts about how the universe works. And I have to say that I walked away going — and I heard some other people say — 'I sure hope that’s the way the universe works.' Because you don’t know. And that’s the wonderful, sad, and exciting thing about being human. And it’s probably the reason why we have faith, because you had to live your life not knowing but having faith that certain things might be true."

ALSO:

Why was The Good Place series finale so devastating? (https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2020/02/good-places-finale-made-heaven-look-hopeless/606001/)
Mary Steenburgen on the series finale: Neither Ted Danson nor I could play the guitar (https://www.vulture.com/2020/02/mary-steenburgen-zoeys-extraordinary-playlist.html)
Kristen Bell deserves an Emmy for The Good Place (https://www.thedailybeast.com/kristen-bell-deserves-an-emmy-nod-for-the-good-place-finale)