How THE GOOD PLACE Redefines the Sitcom Why You Should Watch [No Spoilers]

So, your job was to defraud the elderly. Sorry, the sick and elderly. But I was very good at it. I was the top salesperson, five years running. Okay, but that's worse. I mean, you do get how that's worse, right? Sitcoms have a rich history of teaching moral lessons. As the most popular genre on the most popular medium in America, sitcoms have always had the unique ability to beam ideas directly into our homes for 20 minutes at a time. Throw in a funny story and some jokes, and these lessons become easy to remember. Usually, there's not much to remember. Tell the truth, be compassionate, put others before yourself. Usually, there isn't much room for nuance in those 20 minutes, especially in a genre where everything is more or less the same at the end of an episode as it was in the beginning. Enter The Good Place from Michael Schur. It follows Eleanor, a woman who's just died and been sent to The Good Place. In the afterlife, there's a good place and there's a bad place. You're in The Good Place. Except, there's been a mistake. She wasn't a good person, and she doesn't belong in The Good Place. Somebody royally forked up. Somebody forked up. Why can't I say fork? If you're trying to curse, you can't hear. I guess a lot of people in this neighborhood don't like it, so it's prohibited. That's bullshit. So, she convinces Chidi, her assigned soulmate and moral philosophy professor, to keep her secret and teach her how to become a better person so she can earn her spot and avoid going to hell forever. I am revved up to learn, man. My brain is horny! The Good Place covers a ton of moral lessons, and the philosophers who grappled with them, from Aristotle to Immanuel Kant and all the other guys you'd see on an intro to philosophy reading list. But, how can The Good Place teach these nuanced lessons where previous sitcoms couldn't find the time? And, how does it do it without sacrificing humor? And, why is that better? So, that's what we're going to be covering today. And don't worry, I'm going to cover the series without major spoilers. I'm Jackson, and this is Ideas at Play. As a genre, sitcoms have been teaching us about ethics for decades. Almost all sitcoms touch on the basic stuff I mentioned before, but some really focus in on doing the right thing more than others. In fact, there's almost always been a popular sitcom on the air that's fallen into this category. Andy Griffith taught Opie right from wrong in Black and White. All in the Family debated hot-button issues, an exercise in learning and practicing compassion. Recently, Parked and Rec has dealt with doing the right thing even when it's hard and thankless, like working in local government. The sitcom institution has a ton of momentum behind it, moving towards these more nuanced lessons. But The Good Place doesn't just take the next step on that path. It takes a giant leap forward. We're not just learning about doing the right thing on The Good Place, but explicitly exploring the ethical philosophies behind it. Still, despite its high-minded goals, The Good Place never feels preachy. Do you have to call me nerd so much? I said a lot of other nice things, okay? Toughen up, nerd. But as viewers, we've been prepped by decades of these 20-minute lessons. We're ready for the next step. And to make that transition more seamless, The Good Place uses its premise to its full potential. Now, the premise of a sitcom is usually pretty simple, a sentence that introduces essential characters and the general situation they're going to be mining humor from. For example, Cheers is about a bar in Boston where you can relax and where everyone knows your name. But The Good Place decides to push the envelope with its premise. It drops us directly into a thought experiment of its own making. A woman is placed into heaven by mistake. It sounds simple, but opens up a ton of ethical questions. Can she enter her place? Do people change? How do people change? What is good? Moreover, the show's setting provides near-constant feedback for each of Eleanor's decisions. This is another way in which your negative actions affect this world. This plant represents your relationship to Tahani, so when you're mean to her, it starts to wilt. Well, then this plant is doomed, because tomorrow I'm going with her and I'm going to prove to you and to everyone that she is secretly a two-faced, calculating, phony bench. Hmm. Yeah. Truth hurts, doesn't it, plant? Not only is this used for humor, but it keeps the story moving, providing concrete feedback for ethics in a way that doesn't exist in the real world. On top of that, the show also finds ways to bring this idea back in different contexts. Eleanor even uses it to create a diversion. Chef Patricia poured her heart and soul into this. Destroying it would be a truly cruel act. This clever reuse of the rules of The Good Place is one great strength of the show, and demonstrates the mindset that makes it so good. The Good Place is always looking to take on established ideas from new angles, whether they exist in its world or as conventions of the sitcom genre as a whole. Here, by picking its grab carefully, The Good Place is able to create the perfect environment for the kind of nuanced ethical conversations it wants to have. Even the plot of The Good Place builds off the sitcom institution. For decades, sitcom episodes have had an A-plot, a B-plot, and maybe even a C-plot. These are storylines that play out at the same time, with the audience being bounced back and forth between them. A good show will have them all interact at the climax of the episode. A great show will also have them all deal with the same themes. And The Good Place does this to perfection. Each episode begins with a quick lesson on moral philosophy, where a theory of ethics is introduced to Eleanor. Then, as we follow her and the other inhabitants of the neighborhood, we see how this theory plays out, before we come back to it at the end, with a little twist. Hey, I got you a present. What? Senegal. That's not a present, that's just common decency. Yeah, but I fork and nailed it. Good talk. It sounds pretty simple, but here's how it's different from past sitcoms. Take this episode of Cheers. Carla puts out a personal ad for a date in the newspaper, but nobody answers. So the guys at the bar answer it under the name Mitch, an airline pilot. Meanwhile, Diane gets a mime to perform at the bar, which is completely unrelated. Carla's penpal relationship with Mitch gets out of hand, and the guys deal with the ethical implications of lying to their friend, even if it's for the right reasons. In the end, she finds out and forgives them, but mainly because a real guy actually did respond to her ad. Now, compare that to the fifth episode of The Good Place, which I'm going to spoil the plot of now. Nothing major, but if you'd like, jump ahead to 7.22. I'll give you a second. So, in this episode, Eleanor learns about utilitarianism from Chidi. She senses that something is bothering him, but they have to put it aside as they host a former marriage counselor and interrogator. You could say I wrote the book on healthy relationships. And I did! It's called How to Spot Problems in a Marriage from 100 Miles Away. Oh, cool! Yeah, really cool. Meanwhile, we reflect on Tahani's life, who can't figure out why she isn't higher on the good person rankings. She ends up focusing on trying to help Michael fix a neighborhood, just to prove how good she is. Did I fix the sinkhole? Am I a heroine? No, you did something catastrophically stupid. Eventually, she realizes that whatever good she did was done to upstage her sister, not to help people. I am going to reach heights of success and sophistication that you can only dream of. Your cardigan's on inside out. I know! Likewise, Eleanor realizes that her happiness means Chidi's unhappiness, since he'll never get to meet his true soulmate. I'm basically a utilitarian nightmare. Every ounce of my happiness leads to a ton of pain for you, so every time the simple fact of my existence starts to bum you out, I want you to hold this up. The conclusion that The Good Place arrives at has a lot more nuance to it than Cheers, and uses both of its plotlines to explore it from different angles. Often, thought experiments force us to choose between two ideas, but The Good Place is interested in the best option, a third one that's not presented. This nuance is at the heart of The Good Place, often looking carefully at our motivations for doing things rather than just the simple outcomes. It's another sneaky question posed by the premise of The Good Place. If you do good things for the purpose of getting karma points, do they count as much? And arriving at those nuanced answers is much more interesting. It makes for a show that isn't just regurgitating philosophy trivia, but one that's actually adding to the conversation. Even still, The Good Place wouldn't be able to do this if it had come out even ten years ago, before audiences started binging and closely watching TV at large. That kind of dedicated audience and accessibility through streaming has allowed modern sitcoms to become more serialized, building their stories over multiple episodes instead of resetting to the status quo at the end of each half hour. This allows The Good Place to string ideas together, and amps up the pressure on Eleanor as the neighborhood begins to fall apart around her. She has to become a better person, and fast, or she'll be sent straight to the bad place. These are pretty normal ways to use serialization. But maybe the most impressive way The Good Place serializes its story is by using it the same way any moral philosopher might, to provide counter-arguments. You start section two with the sentence, of course, the exact opposite might be true. Without giving anything away, season two offers a counter-argument to the ending of season one. The show shifts its perspective to sort of reinvent the show, while still keeping the main structure intact. Most episodes still introduce an idea, explore it, and then tweak it at the end. The premise and the setting are still used to their absolute potential. Even the central themes of growth and change are still the focus. But season two is able to look at those things from a new perspective, and show them in a different light. It's the same approach that The Good Place took to applying every other part of the sitcom institution. That serialization also redefines what a sitcom can be. Character growth has always been a part of sitcoms, but it's gradual, and tends to happen over years, almost in the background of the jokes. But because of its premise and structure, The Good Place puts character growth front and center. Now, that growth is the mission of the show, and one that rewards its audience. As the show morphs and changes to look at ideas from different angles, so do its characters. We become invested in them because we can see them trying to improve. They're not just talking about it, they're actually doing it. Television about morality aims to renew our hope. Watching these shows is meant to be revitalizing. And The Good Place is no different. It finds hope in the idea that we can change and improve ourselves, and that it's never too late to be better. And by taking the building blocks of a sitcom, and using its audience's expectations of the genre, The Good Place is able to delve deeper than its predecessors, and pave the way forward for whatever comes next. Thank you so much for watching. Please share, like, and subscribe. As always, a huge shout out to my patrons over on Patreon who made this video possible. If you like my channel, head over there and throw in a buck to help make it the best it can be. And if you like my takes on TV, head over to my blog for more writing on TV new and old. Thanks again.