The Good Face: The origin story of The Good Place 's Doug Forcett portrait
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In the beginning, before frozen yogurt shops permeated The Good Place and butthole spiders haunted the Bad Place, there was Doug Forcett. The Calgary teen got stoned in the '70s and made a near-perfect prediction of how the afterlife worked, which earned him celebrity status (and a very well-placed portrait) in the world of the cheerfully existential NBC comedy.
"It was one of the first details of the show that I came up with," series creator Mike Schur remembers. "I just thought it was funny that in this pristine, beautiful, perfectly curated afterlife there would be a photo of some random stoner on the wall that you would see all the time as a reminder of this kid."
Justin Lubin/NBCU Photo Bank/NBCUniversal via Getty Images Doug Forcett's portrait on display in Michael's office on 'The Good Place'
Hit play on the pilot and Doug Forcett's vacant stare is the third thing you see, after Ted Danson and Kristen Bell, in the episode's opening minutes. As the series progressed, Doug took on an afterlife of his own. The portrait's prime location in Michael's (Danson) office meant that was in full view during the architect's antics with Eleanor (Bell), Chidi (William Jackson Harper), Jason (Manny Jacinto), Tahani (Jameela Jamil), and Janet (D'Arcy Carden). And Doug's "closest guess," as the plaque below the frame boasts, became an important plot point throughout the characters' adventures on "heaven" and earth.
To celebrate the fifth anniversary of The Good Place's series premiere, we wrote our very own Book of Doug, tracing the portrait from its creation story to its current resting place.
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In the pilot episode, Schur wanted Michael to explain to Eleanor (and to the audience) that the Good Place wasn't following any one religious view of the afterlife — it was its own thing, with its own rules. Which begat the idea of Doug, the stoner who guessed it 92 percent correctly. (Not bad for a wild guess on a mushroom trip!) "I named him Doug Forcett, in part because when I'm writing, before I know what people are going to be named, I name every guy Doug and every woman Janet. Just because if you stop to think about what names you're going to give to people for too long, you just get distracted," he says. "In this show, I ended up not changing them."
Now that Doug had a name, he needed a photo. And Schur needed a model. He found his Doug in writer and comedian Noah Garfinkel, who worked with Schur's wife, J.J. Philbin, on New Girl and was friendly with other members of the Good Place team. "If I remember correctly, [Good Place writer-producer] Joe Mande just texted me and said, 'We need to take a picture of someone who looks like a '70s stoner. Can you come to the Universal lot and do that?'" says Garfinkel. "I had to approach [New Girl showrunner] Liz Meriwether and ask her if I could leave work early to go have my picture taken for another show."
Asked what made Garfinkel the perfect Doug, Schur issues twofold reasoning. "A lot of it is his hair, right? That looks like a '70s kind of dude." (Garfinkel concurs: "My hair naturally balloons into a '70s stoner haircut. So I was like, 'Yeah, this absolutely checks out.'") But Garfinkel's overall demeanor also fit what Schur needed in this crucial early scene — for everything to feel pleasant and worry-free, even though Michael was informing Eleanor of her own untimely demise.
"I wanted that [portrait] to be in the same zone where it was like, this isn't a problem. There's nothing wrong with this. This is all fine, and everything's happy and pleasant and has a warm and inviting vibe about it," says Schur. "That was probably in our heads when were trying to figure out who it should be. We really want the feeling that the audience gets from watching these first few moments of the pilot to be moments of happiness and positivity, and nothing scary or mean or angry. That's probably the biggest reason why we chose Noah."
Garfinkel sat for at least three different setups ("Somewhere, I've got proofs of like, probably 400 photos of Noah," Schur says with a laugh), and producers chose that yearbook-like one for Michael's office because it made sense as something Doug would have posed for during his life. "The formality of it is really funny," Schur notes. "I liked the idea that he was sort of famous in the afterlife because he had gotten the closest. [And] the plaque is a funny thing to memorialize. It's not, you know, 'Nobel Prize Winner.' It's 'Closest Guess.'" (The date of that guess, Oct. 14, is a nod to the Great Departure on The Leftovers. "It's a shout-out to Damon Lindelof, who'd help me in the early days of the pilot.")
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The portrait was seen so frequently in Michael's office that by the time they shot the season 1 finale, Garfinkel had reached a Forcett-level of celebrity status with the cast and crew. "Noah asked if he could stop by [the set], and when he walked into the room, it was like a rock star had entered," Schur recalls. "Ted Danson was like [gasps] 'It's Doug Forcett!,' ran over and gave someone his phone and was like, 'Can you take a picture?' It was like he was the most famous person on the entire set of the show." (Aside from the Danson fandom, Garfinkel says he was only recognized as Doug Forcett once, by someone working on another show with him. A few people also texted him after seeing promos for The Good Place on Taxi TV in New York City before it premiered, asking if he was on an upcoming NBC show.)
As the series went on, Doug Forcett became an important part of the fabric of The Good Place universe. In season 3, Michael and Janet even traveled down to Earth to meet the older Doug Forcett (played by Michael McKean), and that visit helped lead the Soul Squad to understand — and later upend — the way the afterlife's points system worked, which directed people into the Good Place or the Bad Place.
Fast-forward a few years or however many Bearimys, and a bigger full-circle moment arrived when Garfinkel made a cameo in the series finale. It wasn't in portrait form this time, but Doug Forcett as his younger self, now in the Good Place and going all in on the buffet table at Jason's goodbye party. "That night, I ate a tremendous amount of food in fast bursts," he reports. "And I did, in fact, throw up when I got home. They gave me a spit bucket, but it felt so unnatural to chew something and then spit it out. There was massive, massive amounts of cookie dough and chicken, and I can't even remember what else I was shoveling into my mouth — nachos, I think — but it did not sit well. And it was very late when we were shooting that, so I had also already eaten."
NBC Noah Garfinkel and William Jackson Harper on 'The Good Place'
After The Good Place wrapped its series finale, Schur held onto the "Closest Guess" plaque, which he keeps in his office. He initially had the portrait, too, but gave it to Garfinkel as part of a Secret Santa gift exchange on another show he worked on, Single Parents. It's currently housed in a closet under his staircase. "While I love having it," says Garfinkel, "it's too weird to hang up a big portrait of yourself in your own home when you are a single person." He did, however, take it out to snap a self (selves?) portrait, which you can see below.
Noah Garfinkel Noah Garfinkel and his 'Good Place' portrait
It's a fitting and fittingly meta conclusion to the story of Doug. "It was a sort of throwaway joke that became a really important thread that we pulled all the way through the four years of the show," Schur says. "So in the finale, when Noah was actually there, it felt like 'Oh, this is the natural end. This is the closure for this thing has been happening for four years. It was really fun.'" And more than 92 percent perfect.
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