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‘The Good Place’ Finale Finds the Meaning of Life: ‘Yep, Nailed It’

Michael Schur swears he didn’t name Michael, the avuncular architect played by Ted Danson on Schur’s metaphysical sitcom, “The Good Place,” after himself. The character was actually based on St. Michael the Archangel, who according to Christian tradition is involved in the final judgment of souls.

But the parallels are undeniable. Over four seasons on the NBC comedy, both Michaels spent their time devising elaborate, twisty fictions and trying to settle on a suitably just plan for the afterlife.

“That character is some sort of a showrunner — he’s writing scenarios and putting people in different positions,” Schur said recently. “I gave up trying to argue and have just accepted the fact that my subconscious will live on the show.”

“The Good Place” is ending this week, wrapping up Thursday night on NBC with the series finale followed by a live panel discussion, hosted by Seth Meyers, with Schur and the cast — Danson, Kristen Bell, William Jackson Harper, Jameela Jamil, Manny Jacinto and D’Arcy Carden.

The concept for the series began with Schur’s ideas about a standard for divine justice — a point system measuring earthly behavior — that led to a deeper dive into moral philosophy before ending up as a bright, heady mix of puns, cartoonish tortures (chain saw bears, a particularly invasive species of spider) and wide-ranging inquiries into the nature of human goodness.

The problems with the point system quickly became apparent, a pattern that repeated itself over and over, onscreen and off, as the writing staff wrestled with both the story and their own notions about ethics and metaphysical reward. Last week’s penultimate episode found the core group finally reaching the actual Good Place, only to find that it, too, had its flaws.

“We never felt like we had a better idea than anybody else,” Schur said.

But they did come to some conclusions. In a telephone interview, Schur discussed them, the show’s inadvertent political parallels and, yes, those pesky spiders. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.

(Note: While Schur wouldn’t discuss the series finale, this interview includes spoilers for earlier episodes of “The Good Place” as well as, weirdly, “Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker.”)

Your original point system quickly fell apart. So did you figure it all out by the end?

Yep, nailed it. [Laughs.] The second you conceive of any system of what happens after you die, you then realize, oh, there’s a million flaws with this. The history of philosophy is people saying, “Hey, you know how we believe this? Well guess what, this sucks — we’ve got to revise it.” This show is no different. We were constantly proposing theories and then realizing how flawed they were.

Does the finale offer any kind of answer?

I don’t know that we have an answer, but the show ended up taking a position, and it’s something close to Aristotelian virtue ethics. What matters is that these things matter to you. You’re going to fail over and over again, and you’re going to encounter decisions that have no answer. Anything you do is problematic and causes someone somewhere some amount of pain or sadness or suffering.

And because you’re doomed to fail, what matters isn’t that you do everything right. What matters is that you try. When you make a mistake, you apologize and then you try something else. The show is suggesting that the real victory of being alive is just putting these things in the front of your brain and attempting all the time to be a better person than you were yesterday.

The culture is full of people who seem to be attempting the opposite. You’ve been outspoken about political issues, in particular, were you ever tempted to incorporate more pointed satire within the show?

No, for two reasons. No. 1, the characters all died before the 2016 election, so we got off on a technicality. Granted they did later un-die and go back to Earth, but we never had to mention Donald Trump’s name because they lived in blissful ignorance of the fact that he had been elected.

But the more important reason was you end up making political comments without directly making political comments, by discussing the nature of moral philosophy. When they’re redesigning the afterlife in the ninth episode of this season, the problem they identify is that people can commit crimes that aren’t by their essence cruel, and yet they’re punished in a way that is cruel, and that asymmetry is problematic.

What we’re talking about is mass incarceration. We’re not trying to — we’re talking about this ridiculous afterlife system that we invented, but this is a direct analogue to the problem of mass incarceration. We realized early on that in discussing any set of moral problems, even in the extreme abstract, you’re going to end up running alongside the car of some modern-day issue.

That said, there have been jabs implied by, say, the spinelessness of the Good Place Committee.

That’s the most pointed we ever got. That’s just pure frustration with a certain kind of politician who holds the concept of fairness and making people on the opposite side of the aisle feel good above all else, including just the basic fight for what is right and good. So yeah, that is a bit of an ax-grinding exercise.

Do you think the show had a villain? Even a guy like the überdemon Shawn (Marc Evan Jackson) has a growing self-awareness by the end.

In a tangible, TV-character way, Shawn was the villain. But I think the villain of the show, if there is one, is probably something like a belief that you’re special, or that you don’t have to follow rules or that your problems are bigger than someone else’s. Everyone in the show had some kind of personal Achilles’ heel — for Eleanor it was selfishness, for Chidi it was indecision and for Tahani it was glory-seeking. All of those things are related to the same thing, which is self-obsession.

The show was still a comedy, of course, and some of the funniest lines involved the Bad Place’s creative torture methods. Did you have any favorites?

The ones that were the silliest. Butthole spiders came up over and over again — I don’t know who pitched that the first time, but that became our baseline. The tricky thing about talking about torture is it’s the least funny subject in the world. So it always had to be really silly, like chain saw bears.

But my favorite ones were more specific. Like there’s a joke where Shawn gets zapped into a room and he looks around and he says, “Oh, dammit, I was right in the middle of torturing William Shakespeare by describing the plot of the ‘Entourage’ movie.” That one I loved. There was also one in those webisodes we made where he’s torturing Emily Dickinson by playing her the Joe Rogan podcast.

That’s a delicious treat to give a writers’ room: “We need 50 things that Shawn could be doing right now.” We would write 25 of them in about 40 seconds and then pick our favorite.

The story was tightly serialized and got pretty convoluted. What was the hardest thing to pull off?

I had never worked on a show that had a giant concept behind it. Giant concepts are great for pilots and terrible for shows because once you’re past the giant concept, it’s like, well what the hell happens now?

So I didn’t even pitch the show until I knew what the whole first season was, because you can’t maintain a consistent world for too long unless you know where you’re going at all times. If you don’t know, you’re going to do something at some point that derails you or that becomes inconsistent in the long term.

For example, in the last “Star Wars” movie when J.J. Abrams was trying to course-correct for the previous movie, the opening crawl says “Palpatine is alive” and you’re like, “What’s he talking about? Palpatine hasn’t been in the story at all.” And now this whole story is about Palpatine. Those three movies weren’t broken as one giant thing, so they had to bluntly knock stuff aside that didn’t fit into where they wanted to end up.

The “Star Wars” comment is going to be the one thing here that goes viral.

I don’t know why we’re talking about “Star Wars” now, but I guess it’s my fault. Look, I will see every “Star Wars” movie that’s ever made, but it is a little jarring when they have to explain stuff in a direct way like that. Say what you want about George Lucas’s movies, but at least he was executing a certain vision.

Because we were a year ahead at the beginning, that let us be a year ahead every year. By the time we started the first episode of any season, we already knew what the last episode of that season was going to be, so we didn’t ever do anything that was wildly inconsistent or that had to be maneuvered around. That was the hardest part of it, and also the most necessary part of making the show.

In what ways did “The Good Place” evolve that were surprising to you?

Well, there was a gigantic evolution of what the show actually believed, which was interesting. I wrote this long document to all the writers at the beginning that laid out the stuff I’d been reading and the basic ideas we’d be discussing. And I wrote a note that basically said, “At some point this show needs to figure out what it believes. There’s a lot of theories out there and they’ve been discussed for thousands of years, and if things work out and we stick around long enough, the show has to take a position.”

But I didn’t know what that position was going to be. So what ended up happening was by writing the stories and figuring out what interested us as a group, the show ended up having a philosophy about what matters. And that was really fun — it felt like a four-year conversation among a lot of really smart and funny people about what’s the best way to just approach the impossibility of being alive. And that was delightful.

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