To be sure, NBC’s THE GOOD PLACE hasn’t had much competition in the category of Most Imaginative Broadcast Sitcom this season. (Really, there’s just The Last Man On Earth, which has been having a monotonous and somewhat off-putting Season 2.) Still, while the half-hour form (you can’t really call many of the shows “comedies” anymore) has been exploding on cable and streaming platforms, the broadcast landscape has remained a manicured suburb of workplace and family tropes, some much better than others, but few of them capable of conceptual surprise.
The Good Place was crammed with surprises, and that extended all the way to the second half of tonight’s two-part season finale (Part 1 written by Producer Megan Amram and Co-Producer Jen Statsky and directed by Dean Holland; Part 2 written and directed by series creator Michael Schur). Schur isn’t normally thought of as an ingenious plotter; his Parks & Recreation and Brooklyn Nine-Nine have mostly used plot as a vehicle for character and jokes. But it turned out that he was playing the long game on The Good Place, and his Big Twist satisfyingly didn’t just wrap up Season 1 and set up a potential Season 2, but it explained things that had seemed odd about the show from the very start.
We learned that our characters hadn’t been in The Good Place, a new neighborhood of heaven, at all. The neighborhood’s “architect” Michael (Ted Danson) actually worked for the netherworld, and the “Good Place” was an experimental version of hell, specially designed to make Eleanor (Kristen Bell), Chidi (William Jackson Harper), Tahani (Jameela Jamil) and Jianyu/Jason (Manny Jacinto) drive each other crazy for at least 1000 years. This went a long way toward explaining the inconsistencies in The Good Place that had been puzzling from the start, because much of the time, Michael was improvising based on his victims’ actions. More fundamentally, it provided the reason why self-obsessed Tahani and the stubborn yet indecisive Chidi had made the cut as heaven’s elite in the first place. Michael’s ability to wipe all their memories and start over for Season 2 (but for Eleanor’s quick pre-brainwash note to herself to find Chidi) neatly provides a basis for the next batch of episodes, and the fact that Danson will be able to play villain and that Bell’s Eleanor will be struggling toward a concrete goal rather than just generally trying to be a better person could make the show even more involving.
There’s a reasonable argument to be made that The Good Place would have worked better in a binge-able format, and that stretching its trick between September and January made Schur’s work seem flawed for months rather than carefully assembled, a dangerous way to play an audience. And for that matter, the final reveal gave Schur plausible deniability about aspects of the season that really were flawed rather than deliberate clues. But there was plenty of fun along the way, supplied not just by the leads (the less famous of whom were delightful surprises), but by a constant supply of inventiveness, as in the depiction of The Middle Place in the first half of the finale–which may or may not have been part of Michael’s con–where things lacked overt torture or joy, unless you count a VHS of Cannonball Run 2 (not to mention The Making of Cannonball Run 2) as either. The Good Place also managed the considerable feat of being erudite about issues of morality, identity and redemption without becoming pretentious. (It could have taught something to Martin Scorsese’s Silence.)
Although the Good Place ratings weren’t stellar, it would seem to have a good chance for renewal given its buzz and generally good notices, especially since Schur is apparently looking for 13-episode yearly orders. A seat in front of a TV watching its tricky story unfold next season promises to be a good place indeed.
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