WARNING: Spoilers, if you have not watched up to the episode of The Good Place that aired on 10/12/17.

We could be doing things differently.

We live in the golden age of television.  Critics and viewers alike flock to ambitious, serialized dramas like Breaking Bad, Game of Thrones, Lost, Stranger Things, etc.  These shows have garnered the combination of enough praise and/or ratings to compete with more conventional dramas.  The golden age of television hasn’t been as kind to sitcoms.  Though ambitious, serialized shows like Arrested Development, 30 Rock, Parks and Recreation, and Community received critical praise and cult followings, they struggled with ratings and faced the threat of cancellation multiple times.

The Good Place is another one of these ambitious, serialized sitcoms.  It’s an amalgam of philosophy, heart, wackiness, food-based puns, disturbing clown paintings, and phenomenal acting and writing that’s just plain awesome.  Season two makes it increasingly clear that the show is also a deconstruction of sitcoms.  Here are the parallels:

  • Michael the architect is show creator Michael Schur. Season one implied that Michael was an angel, cleverly tricking the audience into ignoring the name similarity.  Schur wrote himself into his own show as a demon.  I love it.
  • Shawn represents a network executive. Network executives control whether a show gets renewed, just as Shawn threatens to put an end to Michael’s experiment in the neighborhood.  Shawn is all work and no play, and it’s so funny.
  • The other demons are like the creative staff behind a sitcom, led by Vicky, who stage a revolt in the writer’s room. Consistent viewers of other shows have noticed times when a writer’s room seems to be in conflict, with writers insisting on differing interpretations of characters in their episodes.  Lucky for us, the writers for The Good Place write like they’re all on the same page.
  • Mindy St. Claire represents the audience. The Medium Place is stuck in the eighties, just as we’re all still obsessed with the eighties.  Like the loyal viewer of a hugely popular sitcom that’s been on the air for fifteen years, she knows every plan Eleanor, Chidi, Tahani, and Jason could come up with and can predict what they’ll say.  She’s frustrated, but she still cares because she’s rooting for Eleanor and Chidi to get together.  Unlike Mindy, we get to be surprised by The Good Place each week instead of watching a repetitive sitcom.
  • The screams associated with the regular Bad Place are like a laugh track. They sound prerecorded and they’re always there.  They’re a scream track.  Except I want to laugh when I hear the scream track.
  • The Bad Place lacks everyday things that are also absent from most sitcoms, like cellphones and swearing (though the characters try very hard).

The neighborhood is a typical sitcom setting.  It looks idyllic, but everyone there is miserable.  We have the classic sitcom foursome: the sane protagonist (Eleanor), his hectoring wife (Chidi), his annoying neighbor who thinks they are friends (Tahani), and his neighbor’s mousy wife who barely speaks (Jason), except the genders are flipped and the characters humanized.  Eleanor may be practical and great at self-preservation, but she’s selfish.  She’s vulnerable and uses her persona as a shield against those who care about her.  Chidi’s anxieties are justified and he’s no nag: he’s trying to help Eleanor become a better person.  He’s the sane one.  Tahani may annoy Eleanor, but her behavior is the product of toxic family dynamics, not a malignant desire to hurt others.  Jason is only quiet when he doesn’t feel comfortable.  He wants desperately to get the chance to be himself.  It’s so refreshing to see these character types fleshed out into real people.

Sitcoms are (theoretically) fun to watch, but being a character in one would be torture.  TV writers subject sitcom characters to constant conflict and frustrations, all served up for an audience to laugh at.  But this neighborhood is different.  Its creator believes there is a better way to torture and a better way to make the audience laugh.  Shawn believes in “good old-fashioned torture,” i.e. the typical non-serialized sitcom with a laugh track and the same tired plotlines we’ve seen before (let’s do an airplane episode!).  I like Michael’s version better.

The Good Place subverts stereotypical sitcom character development.  Chapters 14 and 15 made fun of the sitcom tendency to reset between seasons, killing character development and blowing up whatever progress the last season made toward romantic couplings.  We saw Eleanor, Chidi, Tahani, and Jason get reset over and over and over.  Yet, the four always find each other, Eleanor is no longer completely self-centered, and Eleanor and Chidi always develop feelings for each other.  Chidi is less indecisive, at least when it comes to love.  Michael has lost control of his characters, like they have become real people.  On The Good Place, standard sitcom tricks don’t work.

Some sitcom creative staffs have hesitated to expand beyond the format and conflicts of their early seasons, leading the writers to transform likeable characters into unlikeable ones.  A prime example is Ted from How I met Your Mother.  He started the series as a twenty-something romantic, who went on to make the same mistakes and voice the same complaints for nine straight years.  Schur has flipped the script: he presented us with obviously flawed characters and is now making us love them.  Not only has Michael lost control of the characters, but we see them as increasingly human and loveable.

Then there’s the issue of soulmates.  The typical sitcom move is to pick two characters and force a will-they-won’t-they relationship, regardless of whether their personalities make sense together.  Back when we still thought The Good Place was set in the Good Place, the soulmates concept seemed flawed.  Eleanor and Jason weren’t supposed to be there, so how could they be good partners for Chidi and Tahani?  Then the romantic pairings got more confused when real Eleanor (aka Vicky) was thrown into the works, and Michael revealed that he had placed Eleanor with Chidi and Tahani with Jason so they could torture each other.  But Eleanor and Chidi developed a genuine affection for each other that has blossomed into a love neither remembers.  Now Tahani and Jason are starting what looks like their own sweet romance.  The fakery turns real.  The characters are taking charge of their lives again.

Doesn’t life sometimes feel like a sitcom, where we’re the characters?  We run up against the same problems.  We struggle to grow and change.  We fail to find love.  The deck is stacked against us and it’s like someone is manipulating our world.  We just can’t hear the laugh track.  When Michael joined Team Cockroach, I think it was Schur’s way of saying that he’s on our side.  Audiences don’t trust television writers.  We’ve been let down too many times before.  We shouldn’t trust Schur, but he’s our only option.  Maybe if we work together, we could all get to the real Good Place.