The Good Place Is Hilarious, Subversive, and Teaches Us How to Be Better People

The Good Place returned for its fourth and final season this week. The show focuses on a group of unlikely allies thrown together who are trying to save their immortal souls. When Eleanor Shellstrop (Kristen Bell of Veronica Mars) dies in a freak accident in a grocery store parking lot, she discovers that there has been a mix-up. She lived a selfish and empty life, which should have consigned her to an eternity of torment in the Bad Place. But due to an administrative error, Eleanor finds herself in the Good Place under the oversight of the angel Michael (Ted Danson of Cheers).

What follows is a comedy of errors in which Eleanor tries to stay in the Good Place with the help of equivocating ethics professor Chidi Anagonye (William Jackson Harper of Midsommar), name-dropping self-absorbed socialite Tahani Al-Jamil (Jameela Jamil), and vacuous drug dealer and failed dance-crew member Jason Mendoza (Manuel Luis Jacinto).

The Good Place was created by veteran producer Michael Schur, who proved he knows his way around a half-hour sitcom with his work on Brooklyn Nine-Nine and Parks and Recreation. The series uses the form remarkably well, adhering to the familiar half-hour adventure format but also offering a very clear sense of progression and development from the leads. The Good Place repeatedly blows up its own premise, offering a series of dramatic and narrative reversals. Its plot owes more to Lost or Westworld than Friends or Mad About You.

Over its first three seasons, The Good Place has evolved from a familiar mistaken identity setup into a surprisingly insightful exploration of what it means to be a good person, or even whether it is possible to be a good person in the modern world. Like any great sitcom, the series hinges on the chemistry of an immensely talented cast, with Ted Danson serving as something of an elder statesman of the form. The second season finale even cheekily casts Michael as a bartender.

A half-hour comedy might seem like an unlikely vehicle for philosophical and existential meditation, but the sitcom structure proves surprisingly adept as a metaphor for the slow and iterative process of becoming a better person. Shows like Seinfeld made the characters’ lack of progression from one episode to another a larger self-aware joke, while The Good Place offers an intriguing and subversive alternative. It’s also one of the most consistently funny series on television. Come for the meditations on human morality, and stay for the frozen yogurt puns.

The Good Place airs Thursday nights on NBC in the United States. It is available to stream internationally on Netflix. New episodes are released weekly.