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Michael Schur is the creator of The Good Place. He was a writer and producer for (and the character “Mose” in) The Office. He was also the creator of Parks and Rec which is a Drury Family favorite for about a thousand reasons, reinforced by all the Indiana jokes and references we came to love. Schur also had a major hand in Brooklyn-Nine-Nine and Master of None. I give this litany to just point out that this feller is behind some of the master strokes of what many have called the new golden age of television.
From here on out I want to give some of my philosophical and theological thinking about the afterlife based on the show The Good Place which, after all, takes place almost entirely in the afterlife. Because of this, the rest of this will include spoilers for all 4 seasons of the show.
Major spoilers for The Good Place below this line!
The first surprise comes out in the first few episodes: The Good Place is not about The Good Place at all, it’s about The Bad Place for 3.5 seasons, then a little bit about The Middle Place, and then in just a few final episodes it is actually about The Good Place, which turns out to be a let down, intentionally for the plot, unintentionally for the viewers. So, a show that is portrayed as being about heaven is mostly about hell, because humans, one might suggest that especially the Hollywood kind of humans, lack the imagination to conceptualize much beyond painful existence… but more on that later.
The basic gyst of TGP, to remind the forgetful, or the brazen spoiler consumers among us, is that Michael (Ted Danson) welcomes sleeze-bag Eleanor (Kristen Bell), indecisive philosophy prof Chidi (William Jackson Harper), name-dropping socialite Tahani (Jameela Jamil), and bimbo Floridian Jason (Manny Jacinto) into The Good Place–a heaven like afterlife that has been designed perfectly for them. It is a wonderfully diverse, charming, and believable cast that we end up loving for a variety of reasons, even when they are acting in such a way as to totally deserve The Bad Place, which is kind of the point.
Of course the twist is that TGP has been designed perfectly for them indeed, but not as a reward. It has been created as an inventive trick punishment. Perhaps the worst form of torture is expecting heaven and getting hell, or expecting hell and getting heaven which is actually hell. In one sense it is an extrapolation on the “sheep and the goats” speech of Jesus in Matthew 25:31-46, but the LORD remains uncredited on IMBD for this show at the moment.
The Bad Place has a new corporate initiative spear-headed by Michael, who is actually a Demon. In TGP Hell has a tight corporate hierarchy and forced culture including conferences, reports, banners, and slogans, as we all might expect of Hell at this point. The plan is for The Bad Place and Michael to create a seeming utopia but then do things to infuriate the four condemned people–all of whom deserve to be tortured for all eternity (within the narrative virtue points system logic of the show). It is a wonderfully inventive plot reminiscent of Aldous Huxley’s imagination, who said “Maybe this world is another planet’s hell.”
An A.I. named Janet is summoned to make impossible stuff possible, or just to summon one’s favorite beverage. Each person is has been assigned a soul-mate–at first for companionship, but later on we learn it is actually to torture them. The plan goes awry because Elanor actually falls for Chidi, who was supposed to drive her nuts. She then discovers the big secret that they are actually in the Bad Place after all. So Michael has to erase all four of the human’s memories and start over. This happens over and over and almost every time Chidi and Elanor fall in love, and each and every time they figure out the truth and the experiment fails. It’s a little cheesy in print but love always wins in Hollywood hell and it works.
At this point a Judge gets involved–but before you think of it as a kind of God-figure I should remind you that she is a little checked out and distract-able–obsessed with TV shows and podcasts, as mundane as any of us. The Judge is a Deist figure, if divine at all. The Judge rules that the four are to return to Earth to be judged again by their moral progress, but they figure out the plan yet again (it’s kind of like a metaphysical game of Clue each time) and in the process learn that no one has been admitted to the real Good Place in as long as anyone can remember. The system of judging doesn’t let anyone in.
[Here of course is when Drury should point out that he could make a long extended soliloquy on the nature of fallenness and total depravity and how The Good Place is actually doing some pretty biblical Pauline reflection on sinfulness here but he’s not going to as he wants to talk about the ending as soon as possible.]
The humans claim the points system is not working, obviously… because it’s not working for *literally* anyone. So in the final season they do an experiment for a year to prove that humans can show moral improvement, a sort of search for the “inner light” in four humans (J. Calvin bows out of the plot at this point). They succeed in seeing some humans improve but one does not, so they fail the test, but all agree the system is broken, so the Judge is determined to restart the whole system with what appears to be a garage door clicker that makes that happen (weird, I know, but it’s all a long con to get the clicker into Jason’s hands for a joke which was worth it.) Then, through an act of self-sacrifice and innovative philosophy they convince not only the Judge (because she’s kind of flighty, and even the boss demon, Shawn, because he’s kind of bored by torture by now) of an entirely new system for the afterlife.
They basically invent a kind of “Middle Place” where someone can earn their way into the Good Place. There were no mentions of indulgences, although such a jab would have been obvious to most anyone forced to go to Catholic school. Suffice it to say they are doing their best Dante impression here in TGP: “The path to paradise begins in hell.”
Then comes the big problem with the entire series. But before that, I digress…
Ted Danson is one of the key stars of this show, and most people my age think of Ted Danson they think of Cheers (this is important, trust me). Cheers was one of the successful television shows of all time, but one of the key dynamics was the spark of chemistry and conflict in the personalities and the sexual tension between his character (Sam) and Shelly Long (Diane). One of the key problems of many shows like this is the “will they or won’t they” problem–and shows often fall apart because the stars get together and there’s a wedding and then the writers can’t figure out a way to make the show have enough tension and plot anymore.
For The Good Place there is never this problem, because even in an infinite number of universes the love story of Chidi and Elanor usually ends the same way. But the real love story in TGP is the actual real Good Place itself. As soon as the four characters have their consummation–the great wedding of finally going to the real good place… when they reach this actual perfect environment of eternal bliss that is The Good Place the entire show falls apart.
Everyone in the final few episodes has a fair shot with an altered points system to make it into the Good Place right from earth (unlikely and maybe impossible) or by performing in the middle place good enough to earn the Good Place. The problem is that once they get there and can do anything they want forever their brains turn to mush. Brilliant people lose all their brilliance because they have nothing important to do or think about. There is no progress to be made. This is illustrated in a cameo of Phoebe From Friends who plays a famous philosopher who is now a spaced out bimbo. And yes, she has a real name and also a character name in this episode, but clearly you and I and everyone else thought: “that’s Phoebe From Friends” the whole time, and she was basically playing the same character as Phoebe From Friends, right?
Apparently, when you can summon anything you want ever, and go visit any place you desire, for all eternity–it can get not only boring but it also becomes a complete soul-crushing experience. In fact, one might say, given enough time, The Good Place is worse than the Bad Place in TGP. And of course this makes sense within the narrative logic of TGP, even Pascal, a Christian, said, “I would prefer an intelligent hell to a stupid paradise.” And the paradise of The Good Place is pretty stupid.
Why?
The problem for the writers of TGP is that infinity must proceed to boredom for the human mind. Even the demons are bored of torture in the Bad Place, we discover. Perhaps these demons believe and shudder, only because torture is SOOooo last Bearimy (if you didn’t watch this show this makes no sense to you.)
This problem is what I want to talk about, and it is not isolated to TGP or Hollywood, or even writers in general. The problem is human.
We have an instinctual desire to explain away the existence of Hell, and a certain drive to develop philosophies where everyone gets into Heaven. But we also have a contrasting lack of capacity to understand and even conceptualize Heaven compared to Hell. Another way to put that is: humanity has a much better ability to imagine Hell than Heaven.
This problem is not limited to the trope of winged cherubs floating on clouds strumming dainty harps, although that is bad enough. It is hard to find a presentation of heaven that is not endlessly sterile and white–Heaven on the silver screen is often a blank white spaced Mac Store with no electronics or color, or like the Matrix movie empty space before any programs are loaded up. Heaven is an empty space in the modern mind. Heaven can be seen as good, but only because it’s the absence of bad.
It is also a little telling that the greatest tragedy one can think of in TGP for Heaven, in the age of streaming and personal electronics, is boredom. So the TGP writers have a solution to this boring actual Good Place. The solution, the culmination to the entire series of fascinating philosophical discussion, creative twists and wonderful ideas, is suicide.
You read that right–Heaven is so boring for The Good Place that the final solution is to offer a door by which anyone can walk through and end their consciousness, to go back out to the ocean like a wave, in Chidi’s Buddhist rephrasing. And that’s what happens (final spoiler alert)… they all kill themselves, but for one who becomes a new Demon Architect.
One might say the point The Good Place is trying to make is not about heaven and hell, and so these “peaceful” consciousness suicides are somehow supposed to make living meaningful in the first place. A major problem with the “bad place” torture is that the scale of the punishment doesn’t fit the crime or the evil of those who go there. The Good Place helps us see that the scale of the reward of “the good place” also doesn’t fit the rightness or holiness of those who go there either.
Ursula K. Le Guin told us one of the worst habits of humanity is “considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain.”
And this is the bad habit TGP, an otherwise brilliant and well-executed show, succumbs to in the end. But I don’t blame the writers, I don’t blame the creator, Michael Schur. I blame us.
The us at fault is Christians. We have failed, time and time again, to ourselves display an imagination for Heaven. Christianity, like Dante, is known for its Inferno, not Paradiso. If you have a conversion with an atheist or someone who has deconstructed their faith, they will bring up thousands of times they heard about Hell, and none where they heard about Heaven. The old song goes “There’s a Heaven to gain, and a Hell to shun” but there is a whole lot more experience in the latter than the former for most that experience our version of Christianity.
I am asking you what you think. What is Heaven like? What will we do? How will happiness be intellectual and interesting, in the absence of pain? If we do not know, how we might fulfill the only prayer Jesus ever taught us to pray? How will we ever know how his will is to be done on earth, if we don’t know how it is done in Heaven?
This is my call to a new imagination, a fresh investigation, a radical obsession with Heaven. You might worry that we become so “heavenly minded that we’re no earthly good.” But I suggest we are too often more Hell-minded as believers than Heavenly-minded. Our problem is not an excessive Heaven-focus, at all, but a lack of imagination for it. CS. Lewis may have been right when he said, “Aim at heaven and you will get earth thrown in. Aim at earth and you get neither.”
And in The Good Place show, it turns out, we get neither Heaven or Hell in the end either.
