As it enters its final season, The Good Place—which has spent the past few years as the best sitcom, and maybe just the best thing, on network television—has earned a victory lap. So it’s fitting that that the show has come full circle by returning to the location, and the premise, where it originally began.
I’m not going to recap the entirety of The Good Place, because neither of us wants to be here for the next 10,000 words, but in case you’ve forgotten where we left off: Our heroes have returned to "The Good Place" as part of a high-stakes wager against The Bad Place. Four new humans have been selected by The Bad Place. If the good guys can prove that the new humans can grow into better people, the entire schema that evaluates whether people are "good" or "bad" will be called into question. If they can’t prove it, all of humankind will be sent to The Bad Place for all eternity.
So yes, the stakes are pretty high (though balanced by a never-ending stream of food puns and butt jokes). The experiment at the heart of Season Four is also a direct echo of the first season of The Good Place, where our four protagonists—Eleanor (Kristen Bell), Chidi (William Jackson Harper), Tahani (Jameela Jamil), and Jason (Manny Jacinto)—were unwittingly made into the subjects of an experiment. The difference now is that Eleanor has come far enough to be running the experiment, with demon-with-a-heart-of-gold Michael (Ted Danson) serving as her right-hand man.
Much has been made of The Good Place’s unmatched tendency to burn through story. This show has resolved entire storylines in just a few minutes when other sitcoms might have spent entire seasons on them. At its best, this tendency has made The Good Place as twisty, unpredictable, and addictive as anything on television. At its worst—particularly in the rougher patches of Season Three—some promising storylines and characters have felt rushed, one-note, or undercooked.
And with so much plot, the show still has an unfortunate tendency to treat some of its characters as joke machines and not people. This season, Jason gets a little bit of an arc as he hashes out his very unconventional relationship with Janet (the exceptional D’Arcy Carden). But Tahani’s begrudging effort to bond with John, the gossip blogger who tormented her in life, isn’t meaningfully different from anything we’ve seen her do before. The problem with any sitcom, no matter how fast-paced, is that a once-fresh gag can morph into schtick with alarming speed—and whatever your tolerance for celebrity name-drops or gags about Jacksonville, it’s safe to say that The Good Place has thoroughly explored those topics.
Most of The Good Place’s rapid-fire jokes still hit their targets. (The Season Four premiere has a gag about the official Bad Place theme song that literally couldn’t be better-chosen.) But as The Good Place has continued—and particularly since the Season Two finale, which remains the show’s finest episode—it’s the overarching narrative itself that has eclipsed all the show’s other strengths, and shifted expectations from a high-concept sitcom to a televised thesis about how a person can earnestly pursue decency in a world that rarely feels decent.
For much of The Good Place, the layman’s guide to goodness came from Chidi, the show’s resident moral philosophy professor. But in Season Four, with Chidi’s memory erased—and, with it, his love for Eleanor—the future of everything rests largely on Eleanor’s shoulders. It’s a fitting pivot for the character who has changed the most over the course of the series, as she puts all those hard-won lessons into action while trying not to crack under the pressure.
There’s plenty of good stuff in the four episodes of Season Four screened in advance for critics. There are also two genuinely special moments. Both of them are long, unbroken shots of Kristen Bell’s face, visibly struggling as she attempts to untangle a Gordian knot of complicated and conflicting emotions. The Good Place has always had a strong ensemble, but Season Four belongs to Eleanor. And since it sounds like this might be Bell’s last leading TV role for a while, it’s a pleasure to watch her take some very good material and make it truly great.
It’s difficult to write about a show as twisty as The Good Place without spoiling any of those twists, so I’ll just say that Season Four holds plenty of fun callbacks for devoted fans of the series, and some fairly pointed commentary about who deserves to be sent to The Bad Place, and what it might take to redeem them. When it comes to leading a good life, this is a show that has never shied away from asking hard questions, or pretended there are quick and easy answers. It’s interesting to watch as a show about what happens after we die confronts its own ending—and if it’s coming sooner than The Good Place’s most devoted fans would have preferred, it also feels like it’s the right time for this series to reveal the ultimate moral at the end of its own story.
How the actor, who plays the show’s Chidi Anagonye, got abs beneath all those sweater vests.
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Jameela Jamil was no stranger to TV, but she’d never acted. And when she landed the role of upper-crust punching bag Tahani al-Jamil on The Good Place, she found herself learning from the best: Ted Danson and his fart noises.
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Carden, who plays a Siri-like artificial intelligence bot on NBC's extremely funny sitcom, reveals how she built her character, why she almost quit auditioning for TV roles, and which legendary TV actor is "a giddy little weirdo."
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In The Good Place, Jason Mendoza is the show’s sweetest (and funniest and dumbest) character. In real life, for Manny Jacinto, it turns out playing an idiot means taking your role very seriously.
Originally Appeared on GQ
