How The Good Place Became TV’s Best Portrait of Friendship

I had drinks with the Eleanor to my Chidi this week—as blunt, mistrustful, and uncommonly perceptive as I am precise, sensitive, and cripplingly neurotic—and at some indeterminate point in the conversation, the tables suddenly turned. He’d been in a blue mood since Sunday, and I’d spent several days coaxing him out of it, in the winding text messages and half-monologues through which I discover what I’m trying to say. In the process of weighing his problems, though, I stubbed a toe on my own; after we settled up and said our goodbyes, I stewed for a few hours, dreamt vividly, and woke up to find the blue mood was now mine. But here’s the thing: Eleanor, my Eleanor, was still the first person I thought to tell the next morning, and though our exchange had an edge at the start—me wounded, he wary—we soon settled back into our usual rhythm, appreciative and affectionate and also quite wry. He calls this sort of small, passing conflict a relationship’s “texture.” I prefer, simply, “friend.” Because, as Eleanor Shellstrop (Kristen Bell) and Chidi Anagonye (William Jackson Harper) come to understand in The Good Place, along with fellow lost souls Tahani Al-Jamil (Jameela Jamil) and Jason Mendoza (Manny Jacinto), an immortal demon named Michael (Ted Danson), and a humanoid store of infinite knowledge named Janet (D’Arcy Carden), (after)life’s least-discussed “leap into faith” is that of true friendship.

This is, to me, the most ingenious feature of Michael Schur’s madcap invention, the poignant concrete upon which the series constructs its dizzying tower of food puns, dropped names, moral quandaries, plot twists: the belief that the person to whom we reveal our worst selves will still lend us an ear when we need it most dearly. As Eleanor says to Chidi in the Season One finale, referring to Plato, “I was dropped into a cave, and you were my flashlight,” and this notion—repeated in the episode’s closing moments, when she writes “Eleanor, find Chidi” on the title page of What We Owe to Each Other—comes into full flower in the series’ remarkable second season. Though it traffics in phrases — “soul mates,” for instance — for which our first association is usually romance, though it pauses on occasion to consider the complications of sex, The Good Place is, fundamentally, about the ethics of friendship: What do we owe to those most familiar with our serrated edges, our inner demons, the traits we might wish erased or forgiven when we stand before The Judge? What does it mean to be imperfect, together? To torture each other and take care of each other, to improve each other, to find, in the comfort and conflict that come with Platonic affection, the texture of connection?

The Good Place has explored these questions throughout its run, but from the (highly GIF-able, culturally à propos) moment in “Michael’s Gambit” at which Eleanor exclaims, “This is The Bad Place!” the series has made the bonds of friendship perhaps its central subject. I lost count of the number of times in Season Two that characters referred to each other—sincerely, lovingly, tauntingly, grudgingly—as “friends,” or “mates,” or “pals,” or “buddies”: In the surgical theater of “The Trolley Problem,” for instance, or after eluding capture in “Leap to Faith”; while attempting to board the balloon in “Best Self,” or during Michael’s interrogation in “The Burrito.” The conceit of the entire season, in fact, through philosophical exercises, public roasts, impromptu parties, an encounter with God (Maya Rudolph), is a series of tests in which the main quartet, almost by definition, can succeed only together, never alone. The code Michael uses to protect his charges in “Leap to Faith,” for instance, which sets in motion the sublime sequence of episodes that brings the season to its stirring conclusion, depends on piecing together clues from each person’s ritual humiliation—glimpses of their worst selves—into the whole that ultimately saves them. The series’ most penetrating insight about friendship, in fact, is that the concept of “best” and “worst” selves is erroneous, because those selves are always already co-dependent on others. “The best version of me is as much about my affect on the world around me as it is my own, egocentric self-image,” Chidi says, in his usual manner, after failing the first test to ride the balloon. “Chidi got in my head,” Eleanor says, in hers, after failing the second.

The Good Place recognizes, as I began to understand after seeing Eleanor, my Eleanor, this week, that friendship of the bone-deep sort is as much about the challenges with which it confronts us, the minor tortures, as it is about the joys: It is in passing back and forth our blue moods, in bristling at each other, in stewing, sniping, and experiencing doubt, then returning to something like equilibrium, that we realize our “self,” such as it is, is hitched to others, that we grow in tandem—only together, never alone. In this the series draws one distinction—between “existence” and “essence”—and blurs another, capturing the slippage from friendship to romance without the reflexive suggestion, so common in film and television, that the latter is the higher-order form of intimacy. Indeed, The Good Place often appears to be at pains, through the magic of its afterlife setting, to gum up the works of sexual attraction: Chidi and Eleanor fall in love, and fall into bed, in more than one version of “The Good Place,” only to have their memories wiped clean when Michael begins anew; Tahani ends her dalliance with Jason not long after it begins, an interregnum in his own complicated relationship with Janet; even the extraordinary season finale, “Somewhere Else,” in which Chidi kisses Eleanor (hot diggity dog!) and requites her feelings, sends both back to square one—and out of the afterlife—almost immediately.