‘The Good Place’ Creator Talks Final Season, Broadcast vs. Streaming

Will Thorne

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The cast and creator of “The Good Place” got emotional about bidding farewell to the NBC comedy at its final Television Critics Association press tour panel.

Ted Danson and Kristen Bell came out onto the stage holding hands, before it all got a little too much for Bell who had to reach for the tissues.

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Looking back on the series as a whole, creator Mike Schur reflected on how the message of the show has changed.

“I pitched this show as an investigation of what it meant to be a good person and found over the course of working on it…that that’s an even more complicated question than I thought it was,” Schur said. “That objective shifted a little bit because what we found…is that the important thing isn’t actually being good, the important thing is that you’re trying.”

Schur also discussed the differences, or lack of them, between broadcast and streaming, revealing that he looked to shows like “Last Man on Earth” when pitching “The Good Place” to NBC.

“If Fox can make that show, I can make this show,” Schur thought at the time. “The lines between what networks put on and what streaming shows put on are blurring….there’s a lot of multi-camera shows in Netflix, everything is everything.”

Later on, Schur revealed that he feels neither type of platform is better or worse to work with than the other, dismissing the commonly held idea that “these people are bad to make TV shows with and these people are good to make tv shows with.”

“I think that the idea, frankly, that networks don’t make challenging TV shows is a disappearing notion,” he added.

When it came to ending the show, Bell revealed she had a sixth sense that the curtain call was coming because Schur began the fateful phone call to break the news with, “Hey, we have to talk.” Bell said she made Schur promise to write her into other shows in future.

The fourth and final season was given a shorter episode order than usual, which Schur said helped with bringing things to a close.

“I’m grateful that it ended with as much integrity as it started,” Danson teased.

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