My Critique of The Good Place Seasons 1-2

 Now, I love The Good Place. It’s one of my favorite shows in recent memory, not only within live-action shows and the comedy genre, but just in general. I think a big part of this hinges on its premise, which is wildly dynamic and unique compared to other comedy shows. In particular, this setting illuminates two major themes:

• The universe is a grand, cosmic, uncaring place, but by nature, and frankly, it’s totally unjust and unfair. This completely lopsided morality is highlighted excellently by the fact that Chidi was sent to The Bad Place for being indecisive, which is hilarious in contrast with people like Eleanor (a morally bankrupt, selfish thief) and Jason (who literally died attempting to rob a restaurant). 

• The universe, and specifically the afterlife, has become commercialized. 

I could talk a lot about Dan Schur shows and how TGP compares and contrasts with them, and how its portrayal of The Bad Place as a business both plays straight and subverts different parts of Schur’s formula, but I won’t get into that now. Instead, I’ll use this as a lens to examine some of the shows flaws. 

Now, for some backstory: I normally don’t watch those videos with titles like “Rewriting [insert series here]”, nor do I really think about how I would improve such series, but I certainly did this with TGP. And I think a bit part of the reason is because I actually adore TGP, and the execution is so close to perfecting its own concepts that I can’t help but wonder how a few stray but well-placed lines of dialogue could’ve drastically improved my own enjoyment of things. 

Additionally, bear in mind I’ve only seen the first two seasons, so if this is resolved in some way, awesome. 

Anyways, my main gripes with TGP actually reside in a rather unusual character: Shawn. Specifically, keeping with the commercialization theme, I find it baffling how Shawn even approved the first test run of Michael’s initial neighborhood. 

And I know, that’s the point: Shawn thought that the neighborhood would fail, and it did. However, I still have some gripes that aren’t so much related to the neighborhood’s failure so much as its execution:

1. It seems absurd to waste so much time and resources on only 4 people (Eleanor, Chidi, Tahani, and Jason)

2. The placement of actors within Michael’s neighborhood is awkward and strange for this reason

Even if The Bad Place is a business with infinite resources, it seems like a waste of time for Shawn to approve a test he thought would fail, and especially because it’s an absurd amount of demon actors/workers only to mess with 4 people. 

So let’s take these one at a time. 

Having Only 4 People:

Now, that first gripe of mine could be resolved with only a few lines of dialogue and little change to the overall story. 

Simply have Michael refer to the neighborhood as a test run. 

Disclaimer, he might have done this, or it might have been implied, but I don’t recall such a thing, so hear me out:

When Shawn believes the neighborhood to be a success, he orders more like it, with, we can assume, more people being punished in them.  Now, when I saw the first season finale, I thought it was weird that only 4 people were being punished and that everyone else was an actor (which I’ll get to later). I assumed it was a “compatibility thing”, so to speak: the Core 4 were chosen specifically because, at any point, they stressed the other three out, but in totally different ways. (Chidi’s uptight personality annoys the more self-centered Eleanor and vice versa, Chidi’s indecisiveness means Tahani and Eleanor are stressing him out, Eleanor’s anxiety is heightened by Jason’s idiocy, Tahani feels lied to because of Jason’s true self, etc.)

I figured that Michael only had 4 people being punished for practical purposes: he couldn’t find more combinations of bad people that worked so well against one-another. However, with Shawn’s command of creating more neighborhoods with such dynamics, it implies this isn’t the case, and that many more after them will be positioned in specific ways to pester, annoy and belittle each other as the Core 4 did during Season 1. This makes sense: considering how many people are in the human afterlife, and how many people are in human history, it seems likely that more combinations could be made that are equally as (if not more) stressful than Michael’s neighborhood, while still having dozens of people hating one-another. 

But why only 4 at the start?

When I first saw the show, I thought this was going to be explained, but it never quite was. It seems like such a random number. At the very least, I ended Season 1 with a major assumption: this was all a test, and Michael wasn’t trying to create a real neighborhood. He was just trying to do something simple so he could create the conditions and desire data he wanted to show Shawn. That way, once Shawn saw how 4 people could easily torment one-another ad infimum with little outside intervention, he would approve larger-scale projects involving hundreds, if not thousands, more people. 

Essentially, I was expecting a mention that Michael’s neighborhood was never truly a real neighborhood, just a demonstration for Shawn of how an area based around “emotional torment” would operate, if at all. 

Again, this felt like the implication that the writers wanted, but without it being explicitly stated in the first two seasons, it just feels like an amazing amount of time and effort wasted on 4 people that broke out anyways. 

Actors and The Story With(out) Them: 

Now, this second one is more tricky. 

For context, these flaws were ones I discussed with my parents, and particularly my mother, who watched the show with my sister and found it amusing but disliked the idea of so many actors. Again, it feels like tons of effort for Michael to hire so many people for “the long con”, and it is kind of hard to swallow. 

The very idea of having so many actors all with the sole job of screwing with the Core 4 feels problematic, but I have some ways it could be resolved. 

My first two ideas are based around the idea of minimal actors working with Michael, or none at all:

1. The direction I thought the show was going in once I neared the end of Season 1 is as follows: I thought that every single resident of Michael’s neighborhood were all bad people. But not inherently bad people, like murderers or thieves; I thought they were like Tahani or Chidi, who did good things but had bad motives (like Tahani) that they didn’t realize were instrumental to the afterlife decision-making process, or they did good things but unintentionally hurt/frustrated their loved ones (like with Chidi). 

2. The direction I thought the show was taking before I even started it is as follows: I thought that the Core 4 were bad people, but Michael’s neighborhood was still a Good Place. Essentially, in keeping with the theme of the afterlife as a business, I was expecting some flashback between Shawn and Michael, wherein they have 4 more people to punish/torment for eternity but they don’t have the time to make a new batch of torture chambers, so for the sake of time and resources, they outsource the project, instead handing off the Core 4 to The Good Place but arranging their proximities and lives in such a way they’re still miserable. Michael would go to The Good Place, posing as a GP architect instead of a BP one, and his goal is still to torment the Core 4 (by letting them torment each other), so his goals and actions are pretty much the same, but without the twist of this being a fake good place. This would’ve made Tahani, Chidi, Eleanor and Jason all bad people, and all the background characters are still good people, and all are just coexisting, with different results

That first possibility in particular was something I thought would’ve been brilliant. Real!Eleanor (aka Vicky) establishes that The Bad Place has individualized torture based around a person’s worse nightmare. This is how Eleanor figured out that she was in The Bad Place every time! She and her friends are all in a situation where they are living their worst fears:

• Eleanor is surrounded by people better than her, and she can’t say a thing about it without exposing herself

• Chidi is forced to make a decision, but his three options (Tahani, Eleanor and Vicky/Real Eleanor) are all people he cares about, and he isn’t 100% into any of them, nor is he fully confident about any one decision, especially knowing his choice will always disappoint at least 2 people 

• Jason has to use every ounce of willpower to keep his personality under wraps, unable to speak or show any emotion without exposing himself, and he has to pretend to be intelligent

• Tahani is stuck with a silent soulmate that cannot offer her any emotional or verbal support, and she is constantly trying to impress the only available authority figure (Michael) while constantly failing at this one task

This was the moment I started to fall in love with TGP’s writing: the show created a very intricate situation wherein all four characters were in paradise (or, at the very least, a place so nice it might as well have been paradise as far as they were concerned), yet they were all miserable and making each other miserable. 

I was really hoping my first scenario (with everyone in Michael’s neighborhood being punished) was correct. Think about how genius that would’ve been! The background characters were still being tormented, because they were literally in the afterlife after an entire lifetime of charity, only to have their paradise ruined by an outside (Eleanor). 

However, even if I’m not crazy about the idea of everyone else being an actor, I will say it is a clever idea that could’ve been done very well. My main issue with the actor problem arises in early Season 2: the demons are clearly entrenched in (and satisfied with) a society based around torturing people for both a career and their own personal enjoyment, and they dislike Michael’s methods. 

Michael’s motivation for creating his neighborhood makes sense, despite (or perhaps because of) how simple it is: he wants to try something different. That’s it. It’s actually quite smart, seeing as demons are functionally immortal, so he’s literally spent thousands of years helping other demons torture ordinary humans. It makes sense that he would want to do something new and be more hands-on with his work. 

But the other demons? They aren’t given much of an explanation for participating. Most of them are confused and frustrated with Michael, his direction, and the neighborhood as a whole. 

This brings me to another huge problem I have: the torture seen in TGP. It’s a term thrown around rather lightly once it becomes clear that this is the drive of Michael and all other demons. However, most of the time, the torture is of an emotional variety, and throwaway lines discuss horrifying possibilities I don’t like to think about for too long.

No matter how much the Core 4 pestered each other in Season 1, it doesn’t change the fact that:

• This pestering is nowhere near the actual torture described by Shawn (having maggots eat your face, all that good stuff), and idk how characters like Michael can find them comparable 

• Demon society is based around torture, which all demons seemingly adore, so there’s no reason why anyone would change anything 

Again, a few throwaway lines of dialogue could’ve fixed this, while possibly explaining why higher-up demons (like Shawn and the investors) would back Michael and future projects involving this specific brand of “emotional torture”. Some explanations I thought of:

1. All the demons, like Michael, have been doing this for so long they’d like to try something new

2. Demons like Vicky have so place to express latent talents (like manipulation and acting), so they jump at Michael’s neighborhood because of the opportunities it opens up for them to express themselves and become more individualized 

3. Eleanor, Chidi, Tahani and Jason weren’t bad enough for ordinary Bad Place locations, so they required a lesser form of torture (in Jason’s case, possibly because he’s so stupid he was actually relatively harmless on Earth? Idk). 

Honestly, a very good way to eliminate many of the problems involving the actors in Michael’s neighborhood would’ve actually involved adjusting most of Shawn’s character, as a whole. Most of his conversations with Michael involve him comparing Michael’s plans to actual hardcore torture methods. However, this pattern is broken during his last appearance when he punishes Michael with a downright hilarious method: putting him in an empty room with gossip magazines. “You’ll never read them, but they just keep coming.”

Considering Michael’s retirement was hyped up as ultra-painful and unlike anything any Bad Place resident ever experiences, this feels super out of place, yet still hilarious. 

In fact, the earlier idea of Bad Place inhabitants being put in their own worst nightmares had some great comedic implications. When Vicky is pretending she is “Real Eleanor”, she claims to have been put in Eleanor’s nightmare scenario: everyday she plans a new baby shower, but she has no idea who the mother is, and no idea who her friends are. 

That’s pretty funny on its own, but not all dialogue describing the Bad Place is like this. Again, most of the time it’s some deviant method involving hot knives or ripping off nails or whatever. 

This leads to yet another problem within TGP: the entire show is a totally satirical, hilarious, tongue-in-cheek look at the afterlife, but half the dialogue in the show breaks this rule to depict The Bad Place as a terrible environment akin to actual, real-life depictions of hell. 

This is also why the actors stick out so badly, as a story concept: they torture people for a living, but they work with Michael to simply annoy and pester a few ordinary humans hundreds of times. 

If the show was consistent in writing The Bad Place as comedic in its torture (again, like Michael’s punishment or Vicky’s hypothetical punishment), the actors in Michael’s neighborhood wouldn’t feel like such overkill and such a waste of time. 

______

All in all, I want to remind everyone that I love this show, and this essay is largely nitpicking. As I said, many of these changes require little to no changes in the overall trajectory of the story, just changes to dialogue and the characters of Shawn and Michael specifically. I just wanted to get my own thoughts out there on how I would have improved the first two seasons of one of my favorite sitcoms ever. I intend to write an essay on the future seasons of this show and how I would have improved them. 

Thanks again everyone, and remember, I own nothing.