That’s All, Folks: The Good Place Asked What We Owe to Each Other

Most scripted television shows end in cancellation, so there’s something special about the ones that get the chance to go out on their own terms. This year, Ken Lowe is revisiting some of the most influential TV shows that made it to an officially planned final episode. That’s All, Folks is a look back at television’s most unforgettable series finales.

Part of this look back at the most memorable finales to television shows has been to trace an evolution of the medium. TV has not been around for very long, all things considered, and it’s changed rapidly during the short time it’s been one of the dominant forms of entertainment and culture. I would argue that if you shoved every television show together into some average amalgam of all of its storytelling ever, the nonsense show that would result would look mostly like a sitcom. It’s really the distinct genre (in fiction) that has emerged from television as a medium, and it’s incredibly telling that so few notable ones dominate television criticism and cultural conversation today.

The situation comedy is not so called because it’s set in a status quo that never changes, but because the humor in each episode arises from the situation: the French cousin is in town visiting, the health inspector has come by, someone hung up the phone before they got the last crucial bit of info without which they will make a series of increasingly stupid and hilariously bad decisions. People will probably cry foul when I compare The Good Place—the crowning achievement of show creator Michael Schur even in light of his other must-watch series—to a sitcom. It isn’t one, but it arises from them, so much so that the cast’s ringer is played by none other than Ted Danson, the king of sitcoms. The Good Place might be the last word on the genre, and it seemed like the only possible show I could end a yearlong column about finales on, by virtue of the totality of its ending and the fact that it happens to have aired that ending very recently along our current Bearimy.

The Show

Eleanor (Kristen Bell) awakens in a soothing waiting room. “Welcome!” a block of friendly sans serif text on the wall reads, “Everything is fine.” It recalls another show where the characters are trapped in a discrete, enervating place characterized by a particular font. Eleanor is informed that she is dead, but there’s no reason to worry, because she is in The Good Place, essentially a subdivision of heaven designed by architect Michael (Danson) to be the perfect reward for only the very best people who have lived the most exemplary lives on Earth. She is assigned her one true soul mate, moral philosophy professor Chidi (William Jackson Harper), and a house that conforms to the reflection of her true self—weird minimalism and clown paintings everywhere.

Elsewhere in the neighborhood are the soulmate duo of name-dropping socialite Tahani (Jameela Jamil) and ascetic monk Jianyu (Manny Jacinto). Jianyu has taken a vow of silence and Tahani never stops talking. They are attended by the all-knowing helper Janet (D’arcy Carden, MVP of the show), who knows everything, pops into existence whenever she’s called, and can materialize objects ex nihilo. Janet is neither girl nor robot. She shows up in your social media feed right around the second week of each October to remind you that Columbus is in the Bad Place. The Bad Place is real, we learn (because they ask Janet about it) and it is an eternity of savage torment.

All of it seems less-than-ideal if not outright distressing, until the biggest reveal: after getting Chidi to swear he would never do anything to hurt her, Eleanor reveals that there’s been some kind of mistake. She was not a selfless humanitarian, but a total selfish asshole goblin of a person, the sort who insults charity workers and drinks a ton so she never has to be designated driver. She was, to put it succinctly, the worst. And now, her presence in the Good Place seems to be causing some kind of malfunction in the afterlife itself, as random, chaotic events begin to take place.

The solution is simple, Chidi decides: he will instruct Eleanor in moral philosophy in the hope that she can live up to her unearned spot in the Good Place. (Jianyu, it is also revealed, is actually Jason, an absolute waste of space from Jacksonville, Florida who is only pretending to be a Taiwanese ascetic because he’s in the same boat as Eleanor.)

And there The Good Place could have stopped, with however many of its seasons following a familiar, sitcom format: some moral conundrum of the week, beginning with Eleanor completely flunking it before Chidi sets her straight, all while hilarious comedy of errors stuff happens around trying to keep Eleanor’s secret. That is more or less how the first season unfolds, until the even bigger reveal.

Eleanor and the rest of them aren’t in The Good Place. They’re in The Bad Place. Michael is not a benevolent architect but a demon tasked with torturing the main characters, and everybody in the fake Good Place neighborhood (except Janet, an abductee) is in on it.

When we say that a show goes off the rails, we usually mean it does something drastic and out of character that bulldozes the careful work laid down earlier. The Good Place does go off the rails, but in ways that are interesting and actually build toward something. The Good Place isn’t a sitcom exactly; the story is continuous, not episodic but serialized. The humor arises from character and theme and the times when Chidi completely loses his mind.

But as The Good Place goes forward—as Michael wipes the main characters’ memories throughout Season 2, as they are given a chance to return to their lives in Season 3 in an attempt to live them better, as they return to the afterlife in Season 4 to redeem humanity—it establishes status quo situations and plays within them, the personalities and comedic stylings of the characters bouncing off of one another, in the way a sitcom would go about it if this were one.

If my sentence above reeling through so many huge premises sounded rushed, well, sometimes the show feels rushed, too. They were trying to cram so much stuff in that the show runs the credits over the last minute of every episode as critical dialogue is being spoken. A major shakeup of the status quo will land like a bomb, changing everything moving forward, and the show continues to roll on with easy, whimsical aplomb.

Because, it has to be stated: the show is a delight to watch. The humor is never mean-spirited or cruel even as it is incisive, and there are too many secondary characters to name without running for another 2,000 words. Amid an incredible cast, though, Danson stands out. It’s all the more incredible to consider that this is the same Ted Danson who will forever be associated with Cheers—the undisputed most popular show when it aired and the most sitcom of sitcoms. Here, Danson’s Michael evolves from a gleefully sadistic demon to an earnest father figure, a brave dork who has come to love humanity and wants to save it.

By the end of the show, it is revealed that the order of the cosmos condemns the vast majority of humanity to torment in the Bad Place, and the central characters are all trying to buck the system and convince the Judge (Maya Rudolph, enjoying herself immensely) to reform the system. As the show reaches the final episodes, however, the Judge instead decides to simply destroy the unjust universe and start fresh. Michael, Janet, and the humans must avert total catastrophe.

But then they do. And the story isn’t over yet.

The Finale: “Whenever You’re Ready”

“The water is still there. The wave was just a different way for the water to be for a while… The wave returns to the ocean, where it came from.”

As the final episode of The Good Place begins, Eleanor, Chidi, Jason, and Tahani have designed a new system to judge humanity. Humans who fall short of living a virtuous life are not sent to the Bad Place for an eternity of torment, but sent to a place much like Michael’s original, fake Good Place: a controlled environment designed to test their resolve, not to torment them, but to set them on a path of enlightenment that will eventually make them worthy of the Good Place. The afterlife ceases to be like Anubis’ scale that weighs the sins of one’s life against a feather, and becomes a kind of video game that, while hard, affords the player infinite lives.

And it works! Humans pass the tests and enter paradise. There’s just one problem, revealed in the episode prior to the finale: an eternity of having your every whim and desire immediately catered to is enervating, a state that lulls humans into a childlike stupor. If you have nothing to strive for, what is there?

The main characters come up with a solution to blissful eternity: oblivion. There is a doorway out in a peaceful wood, and when someone is ready, they can walk through it and bring their consciousness to an end. The knowledge that an end is coming is what gives people the drive to stay in the moment, to work toward goals, to seek and to find.

It is a final acceptance of mortality. And in “Whenever You’re Ready,” we watch as the main characters each reach their moment of acceptance.

Jason lived a life of heedless petty crime and insolence, and as the show has unfolded, he falls in love with Janet and becomes a worthier person (if never a smarter one). Having reconciled with his father and finally played a flawless game of Madden as his beloved Jacksonville Jaguars, he decides it’s time to go out.

Tahani was someone whose charitable works were entirely geared toward earning the approval of parents who always put her in competition with her sister. The entire family is reunited in the afterlife after Tahani has spent countless eternities mastering all the skills she never bothered to learn during her callow lifetime on Earth, and there’s nothing but love and forgiveness between them all. She decides not to go through the door, but to get a job as the first human who helps the angelic and demonic figures of the cosmic order design the tests that humans must pass.

Chidi suffered from an absurd degree of indecision throughout his entire life, always agonizing over choices big and small. After overcoming that, after proclaiming his love for Eleanor and saving the souls of humanity, after an eternity of eternities living alongside Eleanor without a care, she senses that he’s come to the point where he’s ready to leave. 

Eleanor—a lonely person in life—isn’t ready to let him go. But she also realizes that it’s unfair of her to force him to stay.

Eleanor has one last good deed to do before she walks through the door herself. She’s the only one we follow through, and we watch as what she was drifts off into the cosmos. By this time, Michael, who has always loved and been fascinated by humanity, has been granted his wish as well, which is to become a real boy. Michael gets to live as a human—a brief lifetime, followed by death, the tests of the afterlife he himself helped to design, and then the same afterlife.

We see how, even though they will never speak or laugh together again, the two characters are still connected. How the wave was just a way for the water to be for a little while.

The Good Place was hilarious, sparklingly creative, and deeply interesting. But it was also fundamentally a kind show, about kindness and improving oneself even in the face of the yawning indifference of infinity—a fact it reminds viewers with its many allusions to T.M. Scanlon’s 1998 work on moral philosophy What We Owe to Each Other. Sitcoms are supposed to be perpetual motion machines, sources of cheap laughter that sell laundry detergent and automobiles in the hours after a family is done at the dinner table. Very rarely do they truly say something profound. It’s a feat of artistry that the show could take that genre’s building blocks and use them to not only contemplate eternity, but dare to argue that “happily ever after” is the acceptance of the last silence.

It’s really the only show to end on, when you’re writing about endings.

---

Kenneth Lowe SAW THE TIME KNIFE. You can follow him on Twitter @IllusiveKen until it collapses, on Bluesky @illusiveken.bsky.social, and read more at his blog.

For all the latest TV news, reviews, lists and features, follow @Paste_TV.