“The Good Place:” Doing the Afterlife Right
How a Forking Hilarious Show Reimagines Divine Justice
Disclaimer: This article contains major plot spoilers for the NBC television series “The Good Place.” Though even if you’re spoiled as much as I was, it’s absolutely worth watching anyway.
As mentioned in my Christmas post, much of my 2020 was spent binge-watching various TV series — some new for me, others as re-watches. One particular “new” series that caught my eye was “The Good Place.” I hadn’t watched any of it before the pandemic, but gave it a shot because 1) Princess Anna from “Frozen” (i.e. Kristin Bell) was in it, and 2) it had some pretty solid relevance for my family, since one of my brothers is an actual moral philosophy professor.
“The Good Place” appears to start out with a simple-enough premise: a group of people welcomed into the afterlife discover that “paradise” isn’t as worry-free of an experience as they expected. Meanwhile, Eleanor Shellstrop (Bell) realizes that she was put in the Good Place by mistake. She sets out to learn how to become a more ethical person than the amoral loner she was on Earth, in hopes of eventually fitting into the Good Place on her own merit.
The show takes that plot and quickly dives into some deep questions: what does it mean to live a moral life? Why exactly are morals important in the way we live our lives? Why are societies’ systems of law, order and justice set up how they are, and should they be taken for granted as “just how things work”? And finally — in a direct pushback against Christianity’s Heaven/Hell teachings — why would anyone deserve eternal torture of the kind provided in the (aptly-named) Bad Place?
Of course, as a secularist, I personally don’t believe in an afterlife. But if I did, I would hope that it looks much like what “The Good Place” turned it into by the end of the series. Here’s what makes show creator Mike Schur’s vision of the hereafter a better, fairer system than the one offered by Christian theology:
1) Eternal torture is abolished.
“The Good Place” pulled no comedic punches with its portrayal of everlasting torture in the Bad Place — from tormenting Shakespeare with the plot of “Entourage,” to average-working-Joe lava monsters, to provoking mental images of torture devices like “Bees With Teeth” and “Penis-Flatteners” (tm).
The show could easily make us laugh about eternal torture, precisely because it’s an absurd concept. It’s a “punishment” with no redemptive value, yet those of us who grew up in church were taught that it’s nonetheless inflicted on billions of ordinary people who have committed no crime.
Fortunately, “The Good Place’s” heroes figure out how to build an afterlife-society that does away with arbitrary pain and suffering, replacing it with a much more constructive system of justice.
2) The divine “points system” emphasizes actions, rather than thoughts or beliefs.
This feature was actually part of the show’s canon from the start, and for good reason. For all of the show’s engaging mini-lectures on moral philosophy, “The Good Place” is virtually silent on any issues about religion’s interaction with morality. This absence actually speaks volumes in itself, driving home the point that spiritual beliefs about the universe, or gods, or sins against those gods, don’t necessarily make you more or less of a moral person.
In the show’s canon, each action taken during life on Earth will either increase or decrease your “points total,” based on how much good or harm it can potentially create in the world around you.
The examples given in the pilot episode range from the simple…
Remember sister’s birthday, +15.02
Tell a woman to “smile,” -53.83
…to the breathtakingly specific and/or outrageous:
Maintain composure in line at water park in Houston, +60.65
Fail to disclose camel illness when selling camel, -22.22
In short, what you actually do is far more important than the belief system that led you to do it.
3) The system can be changed if necessary.
In the third season, the heroes discover that no one — not a single person — had been admitted to the Good Place in over 500 years. But it wasn’t because humans had necessarily become worse; the world had become so interconnected and complicated that producing a net-positive impact on the world was much more difficult. Clearly, the system wasn’t working, at least not in a way that was actually doing any good for humanity.
But as it turns out, the afterlife’s “laws” aren’t some mysterious, rigid, impersonal institution — they’re set up and enforced by intelligent beings who can reason, argue, and negotiate. And that’s exactly what all sides — humans, Good Place “angels” and Bad Place “demons” alike — do to create a system that works for everyone and avoid needless suffering.
At series’ end, the system was working brilliantly. However, perhaps sometime in the distant future, it will no longer work as intended and will need to be changed again. And that’s okay! The important thing is that it can change.
4) Each person can work and improve to eventually earn their spot in the Good Place.
“The Good Place” imagined that people’s immortal souls have the same psychology after death as when they were living on Earth. Thus, and more importantly, it also argued that they have just as much capacity to learn and improve themselves on either side of the life/afterlife bridge. There was no reason why everyone should not receive the same opportunity to get better.
So in the end, the system changed: instead of a person’s point total being a final, eternal decider of torture vs. paradise, the point total becomes a baseline for how easy or difficult that person’s path will be to eventually reach the Good Place. Each person is tested, as much as needed, according to their greatest character flaws in life that prevented them from treating others as morally as they might have.
An individual test involves placing you in a realistic, usually uncomfortable scenario, where you must decide how to act. Fail a test spectacularly? No problem! You receive feedback on where you went wrong and then get tested again — this time a little bit wiser, and left with faint recollections of your previous experience.
5) Each person can choose if and when to end their afterlife.
One of the more surprising plot twists (which is saying something) is that the Good Place’s residents turned out to be completely miserable in their everlasting “paradise.” It just so happens that if every single moment is “perfect,” then no moment is. Couple that with a never-ending string of time, and the Good Place ironically becomes a different form of inescapable torture.
How, then, does one change the system even further and prevent another form of human suffering?
The solution came from a thought from mid-series that returned for an excellent payoff — the realization that life only has meaning because it ends, however sad that makes us all. So our heroes arrange for the creation of a “doorway” that one could enter when they are finally fulfilled and at peace, with nothing more to gain from the Good Place. Upon entering the door, their “time in the universe will end,” as the show gracefully puts it, and they can leave existence on their own terms.
Our society today is more willing than ever to ask difficult questions, and confront the possibility of even more difficult answers. “The Good Place,” apart from being a fantastically-written and hilariously-performed sitcom, encourages sincere thought about a variety of such questions.
Among these questions, the show challenges certain precepts of religious thought. What is the point of teaching about Christianity’s Good Place and Bad Place? Why, honestly, would anyone deserve to suffer pointlessly for eternity? Is there a better, more constructive way of thinking?
I would argue that there is indeed a better way, and that — just as “The Good Place’s” characters had to do — it’s time to question, change, and (if needed) let go of certain beliefs in order to build a society that works for us all.
