The phrase above, painted in green on a beige wall, was initially what greeted recently-deceased humans in the waiting room outside the office of the architect of a neighborhood in The Good Place.

”The Good Place” was an NBC sitcom that ran for four seasons, from September 19, 2016 to January 30, 2020. Despite being on four years, it only spanned 50 episodes, as it did not adhere to the typical 22-episode season count that American sitcoms usually have. Each season usually only had about 12 episodes. It was the brain child of Michael Schur, who was previously involved in the American version of The Office and co-created Parks and Recreation. This show is funny, sometimes dramatic, and delves quite a bit into aspects of moral philosophy.

“The Good Place” was, and is, one of the best forking sitcoms in television history.

Let me explain...

First of all, it is important to note that this writeup will be divided into two sections. The first section discusses the series in more general terms. The second section will include spoilers. MAJOR spoilers. DO NOT READ THAT SECTION IF YOU HAVE NOT AT LEAST GOTTEN PAST THE FINALE OF SEASON ONE. Seriously. Don’t. Capiche?

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The premise of the show basically that after you die, you go to either The Good Place or The Bad Place. What determines if you’ve been good enough for The Good Place is a point system. When you do bad things you lose points. When you do good things you gain points. It seems simple, but it is anything but. The problem is, to get into The Good Place, you need an extraordinary amount of points. Only the cream of the crop get to go to the place that is not eternal torture. It seems somewhat unfair. Why isn’t there a “Medium Place?” Like for people who weren’t that bad, but not so great?

This is where Eleanor Shellstrop comes in, nominally the star character of the series, played by the lovely Kristen Bell, a woman who dies and finds herself in The Good Place. Very early in the pilot episode we learn that she does not actually belong there. She is a self-described “trash bag from Arizona.” The central conflict, of the first season at least, is Eleanor’s fight to stay in The Good Place. (More on her character in a bit.) In the very first scene she opens her eyes and finds herself in the aforementioned waiting room, and shortly thereafter the architect of that particular Good Place neighborhood kindly ushers her into his office. This is Michael, played by former “Cheers” bartender Ted Danson. But he’s no Sam Malone - silver-haired and bespeckled, he usually wears some sort of grey suit, complete with a bow tie. He is ostensibly a kind, caring, and wise higher being of some unclear sort.

Eleanor cannot remember how she died, and Michael explains the reason is because your death is wiped from your memory if said death was extremely traumatic and/or embarrassing. Eleanor’s death, it turns out, qualified as the latter, who died this way, in the words of Michael: she was in a grocery store parking lot. She dropped a bottle of “Lonely Gal Margarita Mix for One” and when she bent down to pick it up, a long column of shopping carts rolled out of control and plowed into her. But wait, there’s more. The carts pushed her into the path of a truck advertising an erectile dysfunction pill called “Engordulate.” Eleanor doesn’t like hearing this, but she does like hearing that she is in The Good Place.

Another one of the questions that Eleanor asks Michael is probably one of the most popular questions a person would ask in such a situation, “Who was right?” As in, which religion got it right. Michael explains that each of the world’s biggest religious got everything about 5% right, but Doug Forcett, a Canadian who, in the 1970’s, after tripping balls on some magic mushrooms, goes into a monologue where he gets the truth about 95% right. It is revealed later in the show that he is still alive and lives his life as selflessly as he can, much to his own detriment, in an attempt to optimize his point total.

After their initial meeting in his office, Michael introduces Eleanor to one of the other primary characters, Chidi Anagonye, played by William Jackson Harper. Chidi is a deceased professor of ethics and moral philosophy from Senegal. Michael says that he is Eleanor’s soulmate - he also explains that, in fact, everybody in The Good Place gets a soulmate. But when Michael is out of the room, Eleanor has a confession for her newly-discovered soulmate: she’s not supposed to be there!

Somebody Forked Up.

When she tried to tell Chidi that somebody “forked up” she realizes that you cannot curse in The Good Place and that it is prohibited. “That’s bullshirt!” This ends up being quite a hilarious running gag in the series, and a clever way for the characters to cuss without trouble from network censors. Anyway, Eleanor explains to Chidi that she was quite a bench during her life on Earth, and she is nothing like the Eleanor Shellstrop that Michael thinks she is: a perfect, selfless person who dedicated her whole life to charity. Memories of her supposed life, presented to Eleanor from a first-person POV on a digital screen, contrast starkly to her actual life, in which her career was in selling fake medicine to elderly folk.

Chidi: “You defrauded the elderly. Sorry — the sick and the elderly.”

Eleanor: “I was good at it, too. Top salesperson five years in a row.”

Chidi: “That’s worse. You do get why that’s worse, right?”

And so, the two characters end up being perfect foils for each other: Chidi, an expert in morals and ethics, paired up with Eleanor, a self-absorbed woman from Arizona, emancipated from her garbage parents as a young teen, who was a defrauding sales clerk who always, via various dishonest ways, skipped out on her turn to be the designated driver among her bar-hopping friends. She was so self-absorbed, in fact, that after spending an entire day which Chidi, the only thing she remembered about him was his first name.

The central plot of this comedy becomes Eleanor seeking Chidi’s help, not only to hide her true self from Michael, something the uber-honest Chidi has a very difficult time with, but to also teach Eleanor about ethics and morals, to help her become a better person, and actually earn her place in The Good Place.

Still in the pilot episode, we are introduced to several more memorable characters. In a castle-like home next-door in the neighborhood - a stark contrast to Eleanor’s strange little cottage - lives Tahani Al-Jamil (played by Jameela Jamil), a mocha-skinned towering beauty who, before her untimely death, was an extremely wealthy British philanthropist. She’s a good, cheery, but often condescending person, with an extreme tendency to name drop celebrities that she’s had dubious associations with. The soulmate she lives with in her castle is Jianyu Li - played by Manny Jacinto - a Taiwanese Buddhist monk, still adhering to his Earthly vow of silence, which makes his character quite mysterious at first.

And then there’s Janet.

She’s not a girl. She’s not a robot. Two things she will often remind everybody of throughout the run of the series. As Chidi explains it to Eleanor in the pilot, she’s like a walking database of knowledge. She literally knows virtually everything in and about the universe. She is played by the uber-talented actress D’Arcy Carden. Janet, although not a girl, was once mistakenly referred to by Eleanor as “Busty Alexa.” She can provide The Good Place residents with almost anything they want to know, but she can also conjure up virtually any object residents request of her, like food, clothes, books, technology, whatever. In the initial episodes a running gag with her is how she appears very suddenly when she’s called, with FOOM! noise that is somehow pleasant but jarring at the same time. ”WHAT THE FORK?!” exclaimed Eleanor the first time Chidi called for her. Janet is aggressively friendly and always wears outfits that resemble dresses female flight attendants would wear, but of a style harkening back to a time when they were referred to as a flight stewardess. In one early Season One episode, she gets into telling everybody fun facts, like when she cheerfully tells Chidi that Christopher Columbus is in The Bad Place “because of all the raping, slave trade, and genocide!” Janet is truly one of the most unique, interesting, and funny characters in all of sitcom history.

The Forkin’ Philosophy

As funny as “The Good Place” is, it has plenty of drama as well. But most interestingly, it is one of the only shows in TV to ever tackle philosophy, as it is discussed often during Chidi’s lessons to Eleanor. Indeed, he becomes quite a teacher to Eleanor about ethics and morals. From watching this show, you, too, can learn about many aspects of moral philosophy and about many moral philosophers.

An exasperated Eleanor, during one lesson, says “Who died and left Aristotle in charge of ethics?!”

Incredulous, Chidi points to his chalkboard of important philosophers and says “Plato!”

Indeed, the philosophy lesson embedded in “The Good Place” runs the gamut from Plato, to Immanuel Kant, to Thomas Aquinas, to contemporary authors like T.M. Scanlon, who’s book “What We Owe to Each Other” becomes an important part of the show.

However, Aristotle’s virtue ethics and Jeremy Bentham’s utilitarianism are oft-discussed and butt-heads with one another as the characters, usually Chidi and Eleanor, try to navigate the moral conundrums they find themselves in, which began with Chidi deciding whether to not he could or should help Eleanor in the first place. As we find out, as well as being an expert on ethics, Chidi is also a tortured person, with crippling anxiety and indecisiveness, caused by his constant thinking and rethinking of all the ethical schools of thought.

Should he lie to Michael?

Should he keep his promise to help Eleanor, which he made before he found out she was a fraud?

Chidi struggles mightily with these conflicting questions as he continues the lessons with Eleanor. And as the first season moves along, things become more and more complicated. Sometimes hilariously complicated. Sometimes dramatically complicated.

Essentially, it becomes more and more difficult to maintain the ruse. Of course, the word “sitcom” is short for “situational comedy” and the show is chock full of comedic situations that the characters find themselves in. Eleanor’s drunken antics, before she really tries to dial-in the lessons she’d learned from Chidi, have an actual effect on the physical reality of the Good Place neighborhood they reside in, causing giant lady bugs, as well as showers, not of rain, but of giant shrimp or garbage.

(Yes, strangely, even though the characters are the afterlife, you can still get drunk, you still have to eat, and you even still have to do dishes and laundry, which Chidi has to do when he and Eleanor live together because she avoids the responsibility.) A cute little tree/shrubbery thing that Tahani gives Eleanor starts to wilt when Eleanor complains of how condescending Tahani is, and verbally expresses her suspicions that Tahani is secretly plotting something. And when Eleanor gets more aggressive with her Tahani criticisms it even catches on fire!

But Tahani is not secretly up to something. Her favorite things to do is decorate, plan parties, accessorize, and talk endlessly about her associations with Elon Musk or Taylor Swift or Kanye West or... well, you get the gist. And her love of talking causes her much consternation that her soulmate doesn’t talk. At least not at first. I don’t think this is much of a spoiler because this happens only in the first few episodes, but Jianyu, like Eleanor, is also not all he appears to be. The revelation of who he really is leads to him being the main source of comic relief in the show, which is interesting considering how the character starts out. Stoic and silent at first, he ends up being aggressively not those things.

But Tahani’s and Jianyu’s problems pale in comparison to Eleanor’s, as Michael appoints her his assistant to figuring out what is going wrong with the neighborhood, when Eleanor secretly knows that she is the source of the problems. This is just one example of the complications that arise that forces Eleanor to consider coming clean to Michael.

Does she?

We’ll find out in the spoilers section.

All in all, “The Good Place” is an excellent show. It will make you laugh. It will make you think. It will even sometimes make you cry. For TGP is full of jokes, deep philosophy, and, most importantly, heart. I give it six out of five stars. Yes, it’s that good. And you can find the first three seasons on Netflix - season Four coming soon.

So anyway, speaking of those spoilers...

2

SPOILER WARNING

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Yes, Eleanor does come clean to Michael, in quite a surprising move, as the first season nears its closing episodes. It is revealed that Eleanor Shellstrop shares the exact same name as another Eleanor Shellstrop, who died at the same exact spot, at the same time, which is what caused the whole error of Eleanor being sent to The Good Place (with the other “good” Eleanor being sent to The Bad Place). It’s also revealed that Jianyu’s real name is Jason Mendoza, a failed (no, sorry, “pre-successful”) EDM DJ from Jacksonville, Florida. He, too, is a mistake (a REALLY big one), and everything since Eleanor’s confession becomes a royal clusterfork. Before things went off the rails, Chidi tried to include Jason in his ethics classes, but Jason, the dullest tool in the shed, is reluctant to learn about “ethnics.” He’d rather play EDM and video games in his “bud hole” at his and Tahani’s castle. And he’s not Taiwanese, he’s Filipino, a confusion that he found to be “kind of racist.”

Soon after Eleanor’s confession, the neighborhood is invaded by Bad Place demons, with a Bad Janet (forking hilarious, also played by Carden) and the “real” Eleanor Shellstrop in tow, played by Tiya Sicar. The head demon is Trevor, a masterfully funny ash-hole who could have only been played by Adam Scott (think of his douchebag from “Stepbrothers” cranked up several notches). Everything basically becomes a big forking mess from that point until the end of the season, with the two Eleanors and Chidi finding themselves in a sort of a love triangle, Tahani miserable with her fake soulmate, and Eleanor’s afterlife and her eternal soul hanging in the balance. Well, Jason’s, too, but that dim-witted soul is never really all that concerned, about that, or, really, anything else.

An afterlife judge is called in, Shawn (Marc Evan Jackson), but when he arrives, Eleanor, Jason, and Janet escape on a train to go to an actual Medium Place, which was an idea of Eleanor’s that she finds out actually exists. There they meet Mindy St. Claire (Maribeth Monroe), a sort of good, but sort of bad woman who loves masturbation and cocaine. She alone lives in the Medium Place, which is why she’s naked when the trio arrive. They are forced to return, however, to their neighborhood when Shawn threatens to send Chidi or Tahani to The Bad Place. When they return too late, Eleanor, Chidi, Tahani, and Jason are forced to fight over who gets to stay, and who goes down to The Bad Place. As the agonizing and arguing goes on, Eleanor shuts up and quietly thinks to herself... and that is when it hits her...

”THIS is The Bad Place!”

In one of the most shocking twists in television sitcom history, in the Season One finale episode “Michael’s Gambit” Eleanor figures out that she, Chidi, Tahani, and Jason have actually been in The Bad Place the whole time! This is because she realizes they’ve all been torturing each other since the moment all four of them arrived. Eleanor causing Chidi near-constant worry. Tahani tortured by Jason. Eleanor jealous of Tahani. They were all Michael’s puppets in a way, who, as it turns out, is actually a Bad Place demon, and the whole neighborhood was an experiment filled with demons, with Eleanor, Chidi, Tahani, and Jason being the only actual humans there. In a hilarious scene the other Eleanor bursts in, with a prepared speech about her love for Chidi, but when Michael tells her it’s over, give up, the character, who’s actually a demon named Vicki, tells them all to suck it and she storms out.

But why, you might ask, if you were unwise enough to read to this point even though you don’t know, were Tahani and Chidi in the Bad Place? Eleanor spent her life being selfish and Jason spent his life doing petty crimes and solving problems with Molotov cocktails. But what did Tahani and Chidi do? Tahani raised billions of dollars for charity. Chidi actually taught ethics and moral philosophy. Well, Tahani’s motivations were corrupt, it was done to upstage her rival sister, Kamilah. And Chidi, in his life, made everybody around him miserable with his rigidity and indecisiveness. Tahani’s rivalry with her sister, and Chidi’s indecisiveness, are what actually lead to their deaths, which lead them to being tortured by themselves and Michael in the afterlife.

Michael was actually an architect, but for a new kind of experimental Bad Place neighborhood, where four humans were picked who were perfectly suited to torture each other and fooled into thinking they were actually in The Good Place. But when the experiment failed, he was in trouble with his boss, Shawn, who was not a judge, but rather a demon even more evil than Michael. He enjoyed torturing people in the typical Bad Place fashion, like with penis flatteners and bees with teeth. But Michael makes a plea to Shawn to let him try again. Shawn agrees, and the four humans and the experiment are rebooted. Which means their memories were wiped and the experiment restarted, with things done differently to avoid having the same problem again, which was mainly Eleanor figuring out the ruse. The saddest thing about the memory wipe and the reboot is that Chidi and Eleanor were falling in love and creating quite a bond with each other. Which was unfortunately wiped away.

And that lead the show into Season 2.

I am not going to discuss the other three seasons at length like I did Season One, but all of the seasons were just as good, maybe better, than the first. Each season has its own storyline and themes, while sticking to some basic overall themes for the show, which are questions about morality, friendship, love, and what it means to be human.

Season 2 begins with reboot after reboot after reboot, with the experiment hilariously failing hundreds of times, which are mostly glossed over to save for time. Along with repeatedly falling for Chidi (and he for her) Eleanor figures it out the ruse every time... except for one. In one of Michael’s most embarrassing moments Jason actually figures it out. But Shawn only knew about the one failure, which increasingly puts Michael out on a limb, as he, like Eleanor in the first season, has to keep a secret about himself, that he has been failing over and over again at the experiment. And if Shawn found out, Michael would be sent to retirement, which for a demon is not pleasant. It’s basically a spectacular death.

This dilemma, exacerbated by Vicki’s threat to expose Michael’s deception to Shawn because she didn’t feel she was getting worthy character parts in the reboots, is what leads to Michael ceasing the reboot cycle and coming to the four humans for help. They reluctantly do. And thus begins the process of un-demonizing Michael. As part of the bargain he attends Chidi’s ethics classes and learns not only how to be good, but how to be more human. Well, it doesn’t go very smoothly at first. In a hilarious episode Michael turns the infamous philosophical Trolley Problem into a hilarious, and bloody, real simulation. But it wasn’t to learn more about it, it was to torture Chidi some more.

But Michael eventually comes around and genuinely tries to improve himself. This leads to he trying to help the humans get to the real Good Place and see the real judge, but first they must sneak through the real Bad Place to do this. That adventure was both hilarious and harrowing, but they do end up getting to the judge... Judge Gen, played by the comedic SNL alum Maya Rudolph. After she tests the four humans she comes to the conclusion that, despite how much each of them has tried to improve, that they all still belong in the Bad Place. But Michael saves them all by proposing a new type of experiment. The Judge reluctantly agrees and once again the four humans are rebooted, but this time their Earthly timelines are reset, they go back in time, and Michael saves each one of them so that they don’t die in the first place. He pushes Eleanor away from the shopping carts. He rescues Jason from being stuck and suffocated in a safe as a result of a failed, and hilarious, attempt at a heist. He saves Tahani from accidentally killing herself by trying to lasso down a huge metal statue of her sister. And he pushes Chidi out of the path of a falling air conditioner unit, which originally killed him because he stood there too long on his phone trying to simply decide on a bar for he and his friend to go to. This experiment was to see if the humans, given more time on Earth, would try to improve themselves like they did in the afterlife.

This brings us to Season 3, where the humans are alive again, but unfortunately it looks like they will squander this new opportunity, for without their memories of trying to improve in the afterlife, they continue to make the same mistakes they all did before. This is the fatal flaw in this experiment, which Michael seeks to correct, albeit illegally. Once again he finds himself having to hide his actions, this time from Judge Gen. Helping him in his attempts to course-correct the humans is Janet. I haven’t talked about her for a while, but it’s important to note that ever time the neighborhood and the experiment was rebooted, so was she. And Janets, every time they are rebooted, learn and grow more. Yes, there are many, many Janets in the show’s universe. There’s a Janet in every neighborhood, a good one in every Good Place neighborhood, and a bad one in every Bad Place neighborhood. There’s also a neutral Janet, and, for some reason, a Disco Janet. In the case of this particular Janet, however, she, along with Michael, learns more and more about what it means to be human. At one point she actually fell in love with Jason. That’s a really long, funny, and even heartfelt story.

Anyway, Janet helps Michael go back down to Earth many more times, as he tries to nudge the humans together, because he realized that the foursome need each other to improve themselves. They end up once again taking ethics lessons from Chidi, only this time on Earth in Australia, where he was working as an ethics professor at a university. But Trevor, from the Bad Place, sees what is going on and goes down to Earth to hilariously interfere with this new experiment. Michael and Janet stop him, and the experiment continues, and the humans, like they did before, benefit from Chidi’s lessons.

But, during a fancy party, Eleanor, Chidi, Tahani, and Jason accidentally come across Michael and Janet about to go through a magical door to go back to the afterlife zone, at which point Michael and Janet are forced to explain everything to the humans. And in doing so, they doom them all once again to a trip to the Bad Place when they die, because if you know about the points system, it corrupts the whole process and you cannot earn a place in The Good Place. This causes dissention among the humans, and Chidi having a mental breakdown. But they all pull themselves together and decide that if they cannot help themselves into The Good Place, they will help others get there, and thus begins the “Soul Squad” plotline, where they attempt to save the souls of those they cared about. Eleanor tries to save her mother, another Arizona trash bag. Jason tries to save his father, who also did lots of hilarious crime. And Tahani and Jason go about trying to give away most of her wealth to people in need.

Season Three culminates with Michael, Janet, and the for humans escaping from the Judge and the Bad Place demons, which leads to them having to die yet again, this time by being sucked into Janet’s void for safety. (Live humans cannot go into the void of a Janet.) They sneak into the mailroom of the real Good Place in an attempt to investigate if there’s something wrong with the points system. Michael uses the mailroom to get to the Accounting Department of the afterlife and he finds out that there is something very wrong with the system. Nobody has gotten into The Good Place for over 500 years. Not even Doug Forcett is slated to make it into The Good Place, which is the most profound evidence that the system is broken.

At first Michael thinks that the Bad Place demons have tampered with the system. But that’s not it. The real reason is that life has become so complicated in the past few centuries that nobody can ever earn enough points anymore to get into The Good Place. For example, no matter how much good you do, you consume all sorts of things that lead to suffering, like the clothes you’re wearing being made in sweat shops on the other side of the world. Or consuming products that are not ethically sourced. Things like that.

So it’s time for another experiment.

Judge Gen very reluctantly agrees to let Michal and the humans try something new: recreate the neighborhood that the series began with, recruit four new recently-deceased humans who were bound for the Bad Place, and see if they can’t get the new people to improve. But the problem is, Shawn has to be involved with the experiment, to be fair to the Bad Place and its interests. And he makes sure that the four new humans are people who have the most potential to cause trouble for Michael, Janet, and the foursome. Like a gossip reporter who always caused trouble for Tahani in life, and Chidi’s ex girlfriend.

In one of the saddest developments in the series, Chidi realizes that he cannot continue the experiment knowing what he knows, with his ex girlfriend being one of the test subjects. Even though he and Eleanor are quite in love, again, at this point, he requests to be rebooted again, and his memories wiped.

Season 4, the final season, mostly revolves around this new experiment. Michael, Janet, Eleanor, Tahani, and Jason try to get four new humans to improve, which is not easy. Chidi’s ex girlfriend, Simone, doesn’t even believe that she’s dead. John, the gossip reporter, continues to be shallow. Brent, an extremely egotistical misogynist, is such a douchebag that the task with him seems the most impossible. (He’s basically the worst kind of Trump supporter, even though Trump is never actually mentioned.) And the fourth human in this test, sadly, is Chidi, since he was rebooted. Gen gave them a certain amount of time to accomplish the goal, and ultimately they fail to do so.

But only by a few seconds, as the time cuts Brent off just as he is about to actually apologize for something for the first time ever in his life... and afterlife.

Judge Gen is set on dooming them all, once again, to the Bad Place, but Michael convinces her to go down to Earth for a while, and see what the problem is, see how difficult it is to earn enough points for The Good Place. She sees what Michael is talking about. But instead of agreeing to improve the points system, she decides to reboot again, only this time do it with the entire Earth. This genocidal plan is vehemently opposed by Eleanor and the others, and Janet, along with many of her other Janet colleagues, help thwart Gen’s plan.

After un-rebooting Chidi, bringing back all of his memories, he, with the help of not only his own brilliant mind but also Michael and the other three humans, figures out a way to revise the points system. Actually, they come up with a way to revise the entire afterlife system. Gen, and even Shawn, reluctantly agree to try this new system, which mostly involves testing every person who dies to see if they can be redeemed enough to earn a place in The Good Place. And part of this process is attending Chidi’s ethics classes. Eleanor goes back to the Medium Place and convinces Mindy St. Claire to finally leave that place and try the system. And she, too, along with millions of other humans, earn a spot in The Good Place.

The Fourth and Final season comes to a close as this new system works beautifully. And because they’ve helped so many people, the foursome of Eleanor, Chidi, Tahani, and Jason learn that they have earned spots in the actual, real, Good Place. Finally, they’ve achieved their goal. They finally get to go to Heaven for the final few episodes of the show.

This is where “The Good Place” sees the final crisis of the series. The Good Place is absolutely wonderful... at first. But what they learn is that it has a huge flaw: it’s too good. After centuries and millennia of residing in a perfect paradise that can cater to their every whim, the residents of The Good Place become bored with it. And their minds turn to mush. Even Jason gets bored after a while playing inside his idea of a monkey go-cart race track. Chidi and Eleanor see the problem in high definition after talking to one of Chidi’s favorite historical philosophers, Hypatia of Alexandria (Lisa Kudrow)... or “Patty” - the nickname she prefers. At first he is over the moon with joy of being able to meet with Patty and talk to her, but she can barely string full sentences together. And so, our main characters have one more system to tweak. So they come up the idea of the Door. It is a door than can be death for the dead that members of The Good Place can walk through and end their afterlife. The idea is that the secret to a happy life (or afterlife) to give it meaning, is the prospect of it eventually ending. With this, TGP returns to its philosophical roots, with the profound idea that death actually gives life meaning, and that immortality isn’t really all that great. And like the overall new afterlife system, this new tweak works well. Actual happiness and joy return to The Good Place.

The finale of “The Good Place” is twice as long, and twice as somber as all of its previous somber episodes. After spending what is implied is hundreds, or maybe even thousands of years, in paradise, Jason and Janet together, Chidi and Eleanor together, and Tahani and her sister reunited in harmony, the four humans contemplate going through the Door. In perhaps the most heartbreaking moments of the entire series comes when Chidi is ready to walk through the Door, but Eleanor is not.

The series ends, though, on a high, but quiet note, as Michael finally realizes his dream of becoming human. He goes to Earth and, among other things, he gets to finally say, one human to another, something he’d always wanted to do. He tells a man he’d just met, in the final line of the series:

”The Good Place” originally aired on NBC, usually on Thursdays nights. It starred Kristen Bell, William Jackson Harper, Jameela Jamil, D’Arcy Carden, Manny Jacinto, and Ted Danson. The Executive Producers were Michael Schur, David Miner, Morgan Sackett, and Drew Goddard. It and its actors were nominated for several Emmy Awards from 2018 to 2020, including “Outstanding Writing in a Comedy series.”