Loveday Writing

Season 1 – The pilot introduces us to Eleanor Shellstrop who meets Good Place neighbourhood architect, Michael, who shows her around the neighbourhood and has her meet her soulmate, Chidi. Eleanor tells Chidi that there’s been a mistake and she’s not supposed to be there.

The first season goes on to Chidi keeping Eleanor’s secret and teaching her about ethics so no-one finds out, and Eleanor discovering that another person, Jason, has been sent there by mistake, and the affects that them being there has on the neighbourhood, which range from sinkholes to chaos. In the seventh episode, the halfway point of the season, Eleanor tells Michael and the entire neighbourhood about the mistake. This leads to the Bad Place demons bringing the real Eleanor into the Good Place.

Towards the end of the season, Jason and Janet fall in love and get married, and Eleanor and Jason go on the run to the ‘Medium Place’ where they meet Mindy St Claire, a lawyer who lived a selfish life in the 1980s only to perform a massive selfless deed before dying.

The season ends with the reveal that Eleanor, Chidi, Tahani and Jason are actually in the Bad Place which has been disguised as the Good Place as part of an experiment. Michael erases their memories and starts again, only for a rebooted Janet to give Eleanor a note she left for herself to find Chidi.

Season 2 – The second season kicks off with Michael rebooting everyone and the entire experiment, however Eleanor keeps figuring out that they’re all in the Bad Place multiple times, with Jason figuring it out on one occasion. Michael ends up coming to the group to ask for their help as another demon is blackmailing him, over his many failures to keep the experiment going.

The second season goes on to have Michael learn about ethics and humanity, Janet experiencing technical difficulties due to her love for Jason, Janet creating a male equivalent of herself so she has a boyfriend in order to get over Jason, Michael testing the group’s trust, and all of them going through the Bad Place to have their case heard by the Judge. The Judge subjects the group to individual tests to determine whether they’ve changed, all of them except for Eleanor fail, but as they all agreed to a shared fate, the Judge is about to send them to the Bad Place only for Michael and Janet arriving to help them.

The season ends with Michael convincing the Judge to let the group go back to Earth, their lives being saved instead of ended, to see if their postmortem self-improvement can be applied in an alternate timeline. Eleanor tries to be a good person only to end up reverting to her old ways when she finds her kindness is taken advantage of by others. Michael orchestrates Eleanor meeting Chidi.

This season also has Michael trying to prove the afterlife system is corrupt to the Judge, which is something Eleanor believed in the first season.

Season 3 – The third season kicks off with Chidi, Jason and Tahani trying to improve their lives after their respective near-death experiences only to revert to their old ways, so Michael manages to lure them to Australia where Chidi and Eleanor are, under the ruse of a clinical study. Meanwhile, the Bad Place demons figure out Michael’s plan and finds the group on Earth.

When the group discovers Michael and Janet opening the portal to the afterlife, they have to tell them the truth about everything, which leads to them being doomed to go to the Bad Place as they are now unable to earn points as they know how the system works. After this, the group decides to help other people get to the Good Place.

The season goes on to the group helping Donkey Doug, Pillboi, Kamila, and Donna (Eleanor’s mother) earn points to get them into the Good Place, and Michael and Janet meet Doug Forcett (who accurately guessed how the system works whilst high) to establish a blueprint for humanity.

The second half of the season has the group forced into Janet’s void when the demons catch up with them on Earth. This leads to Michael and Janet investigating the system’s problems further by going to the accounting department where they discover that no-one has gotten into the Good Place in over 500 years. This leads to Janet telling Michael he needs to figure out how to solve the problems himself. He eventually realises that the problem isn’t the system itself rather that the complexities of modern human life have introduced unintended consequences, which affects the number of points that humans can accumulate.

The season ends with an experiment being conducted on four moderately bad humans taking place with Shawn (from the Bad Place), Michael, and the group working together to determine if they can improve in the afterlife. However, Shawn chooses four humans that are connected to the group in an effort to contaminate the new experiment. Chidi, afraid that he’ll ruin the experiment by blurting out the truth to his ex (one of the four humans), has his memory erased.

I wrote in my review of the finale that I felt that the third season was the show’s weakest one.

Season 4 – The fourth and final season kicks off with the new experiment getting underway and Chidi being made the final human in the experiment after one of the initial humans is revealed to be a demon in disguise.

The season goes on to reveal that a Bad Place Janet was in disguise as a Good Place Janet and was sabotaging the experiment, which leads to Michael and Jason going to the Bad Place to rescue the Good Place Janet. Michael then tells an imprisoned Bad Place Janet about humans and the experiments, giving her a copy of the manifesto he and the Good Place Janet wrote in the third season.

The experiment comes to an end in the seventh episode in a crucial moment between Chidi and another test subject who refused to take responsibility for his own bad behaviour. While the Judge finds in favour of Michael’s findings, her initial solution is to erase Earth and have humanity start all over again, but just as she goes to do this, the Bad Place Janet, as well as every other Janet, stop her as she sent them all copies of the manifesto.

Michael restores Chidi’s memories and they come up with the plan of sending almost all humans (with the exception of outstanding outliers on either side) to the Medium Place to be subjected to repeated personalised tests of moral development until they pass (or perhaps never pass it). Everyone agrees and this leads to training the Bad Place demons on the new system. This leads to Michael, the Good Place Janet, and the group finally going to the Good Place for real, where they learn from one of the residents that everyone is a happiness zombie, as an eternity of perfection leads to boredom. Eleanor proposes that a door is created for people to walk through so they can end their existence when they’d like, which makes the residents genuinely happy again.

The series end with Jason choosing to end his existence first, Tahani following only to decide she wants to become an afterlife architect, and Chidi wanting to leave but staying out of guilt because Eleanor’s not ready, although she does let him go, Michael becoming human and living on Earth, Eleanor convincing Mindy to take the test, and Eleanor eventually ending her own existence.

The Good Place Presents: The Selection – In September 2019, NBC released a six-episode web series prior to the release of the fourth and final season. The web series was set during the events of the third season’s penultimate episode and focuses on Shawn and other Bad Place demons deciding what humans to include in the new experiment and how to sabotage it.

The Good Place was one of the most unique shows I’ve ever seen, not only in its premise but its execution. It’s very rare that the makers of a show know how long they want it to last, in this case four seasons, and are actually given that time by their network. Because of this, the show didn’t lose its quality or run out of stream like most shows that go on for far too long tend to do.

In terms of its seasons, I felt that the first season was solid in establishing its premise, characters and ultimately pulling off a great twist in its finale, something you don’t see that often in shows. I felt its second season was where they really hit their stride by establishing there was a problem in the afterlife that needed to be solved, as well as Michael bonding with the group and reforming. I felt that the third and final seasons had more weaknesses as its story arcs and subplots involved re-hashing everything to the viewers, due to the characters initially not knowing what happened to them. However, the final season came to a clean and satisfying close with the afterlife system problems being resolved and the new system succeeding.

Behind the Reviews – Edition #27 will be released next week and will focus on The Newsreader.