Saying “Goodbye” to “The Good Place”
Last week, one of television’s best series wrapped up its run after four brilliant, boundary-pushing, and utterly bizarre seasons. Its final hour was a moving hour of television that should be remembered come Emmy time.
[Author’s Note: The following article is spoiler heavy. If you have not seen the finale — or the series — and intend to, I encourage you to bookmark the article and revisit to it after you have.]
So imagine you’re a television executive whose career depends on keeping advertisement-sustained broadcast networks profitable and relevant in the streaming era. A creator comes to you and says:
“Hear me out, I have this idea for a single camera sitcom about what happens to you when you die. It will follow four very unlikeable people — one is an amoral white trash boozer from Arizona, one is a dim-witted Filipino criminal from Florida, one is an aristocratic Brit of Indian descent who rubs elbows with the rich and famous, and the other is a profoundly uptight moral philosophy professor from Senegal. There’s also two other characters. One is a Hell-dwelling demon who assumes human form to torture people and the other is an otherworldly being/supercomputer who contains all the knowledge of the universe and gradually develops emotional capabilities after she is destroyed and rebooted countless times.
