"The Good Place"

My foray into "Netflix shows everyone else has already watched" continued with The Good Place. I'm pretty sure everyone knows the initial premise, about a woman waking up in a supposedly heavenly afterlife which turns out to not be all that it appears. And while the first season at times suffered, I felt, from budgetary issues (in fact the whole series does), overall it was a nice little character piece and exploration of the idea of an afterlife. It had overtones of a few shows I like, such as The Prisoner (a protagonist kept in an affectedly idyllic place with a dark underside) and Red Dwarf (four characters with clashing personalities trapped in an inescapable situation, high-concept focus on philosophical questions). I managed to avoid discovering the end-of-season twist, but I did know there was a twist of some description, and it was pretty predictable: they're not really in any kind of heaven at all, but a subtle and ironic hell.

The second season of the show evolved the premise in a seemingly natural way, with demonic architect Michael reforming and seeing the error of his ways and, evocative of sci-fi, artificial life form Janet developing an ever-greater sense of humanity. At the same time, the relationship between the two primary protagonists, Eleanor and Chidi, was able to develop further as well. I never found the secondary protagonists Jason and Tahini to be particularly complex, but I don't think that was ever the point, although I did feel like the jokes involving them were a bit repetitive.

The point I'm trying to reach is that as interesting and charming as The Good Place was, I always felt like it lacked a certain degree of imagination. Even in the first season, while the heaven was intended to be false, the representation of a "neighbourhood" of good people taking part in structured activities often seemed to me to not be the main "torture" aspect — that was the clashes of personalities between the four human characters — and the rest of it just suggested that the writers couldn't imagine what an afterlife would be like apart from wish-fulfilment. Similarly, I felt this sense of "sloppiness" evident during the plot in Season 2 in which Michael, trying to hide the failure of his ironic hell from his superiors and attempting to reform, allows "Vicki", another demon, to run the neighbourhood. But we never really see Vicki or the other demons even trying to torment the four humans; they seem to just take Michael at his word that he's doing it. I get that it would have gotten in the way of the show's focus on the philosophy of ethics, but it felt a bit fast and loose to me. Perhaps the intention was that the demons were lazy and stupid, which is why they allowed Michael to get away with it, but this needed to be articulated more clearly. Similarly I felt that in addition to the conflict between the characters Eleanor should have noted that one point in favour of the Good Place actually being the Bad Place was because it's just a bit naff.

All this aside, The Good Place was good enough in its first two seasons but, I felt, started to get a bit disoriented in the third and fourth. I became lost with experiments and points systems; I understood what was happening, but was not entirely sure why I cared. This wasn't because there wasn't a goal, which was first to save the souls of the main characters, and then to save those of all humanity. But I felt that the characters had undergone virtually all of the development necessary for them by the end of the second season, and that they didn't have much further to go. As a result, I often found like the narratives of the third and fourth season were more plot-driven than character driven and were less compelling because they were based on imaginary premises.

This leads to the finale; having finally, truly reached the Good Place, they discover that it's much as Heaven is described by Talking Heads: a place where nothing ever happens. With the infinite ahead of them, humans sink into a torpor, with no passion or drive. When they have decided that they are satisfied with the afterlife, they can pass on to a kind of nothingness, which I've seen perceived both as some kind of final nihilistic act of self-destruction or as a Buddhist "letting go" of possessiveness. If nothing else, it was an interesting thought experiment for how an end to eternity might be reasonable.

And obviously the whole premise functions as an analogy for human life, especially modern life, which can, moreso than ever, be long and pleasant in an unprecedented way. Hence in the show's afterlife humans are still, essentially, human except that they can't be killed and seemingly can't be permanently physically or psychologically injured. They still need, or at least want, food, sleep and intimate interpersonal relationships; they still perceive the world through sensory experience. And their desires are still based in a modern, liberalist, individualist and even consumerist framework. The show does not represent a spiritual or post-mortal existence as transcendental or incomprehensible. This is fine; changing it would fundamentally alter the message of the show. But at times I also found it limiting. It made the philosophical discussions of the show, however well-intentioned, inherently constrained by the limitations of the imagination of the writers.

Ultimately I feel like The Good Place suffers from the same problems as Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, which is to say that both of them went for too long or the writers didn't have enough ideas to sustain them for as long as they did. Again, this is often a shame because these shows can be carried past the point of exhaustion by the charismatic performances of well-cast actors, which both shows possessed. But that's not quite enough, and I wonder if it raises questions with the whole nature of the streaming-era series, which has been touted previously as the successor to the film as the high point of writing and production. A good film, like a good novel, is made and then it's done. Unless meticulously planned, a television series has to sustain itself for a potentially variable number of seasons, not all of them necessary for the fulfilment of a thematic purpose. And if these shows want to deal with serious and substantial issues, I feel like they really need to seem as if each episode is a necessary piece of the puzzle or step of the journey. But, again, these were all shows that started in the mid 2010s, and the more coherent one-and-done limited series have come later. Maybe the learning is already starting. Unfortunately outside of the Good Place we don't always have the luxury of infinite experimentation.