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Casey’s Reviews
Everything “The Good Place” Got Wrong About Academia
Does Chidi even have a PhD?
I recently binge-watched all of The Good Place, a hilarious (and also, deeply thoughtful) dark comedy about where we go after we die. This review will contain minor spoilers but will try to avoid the big twists, because the show is well worth watching with an open mind.
The first joke in the show that made me and my husband truly laugh out loud — we had to pause the show because Rhys had literal tears in his eyes — was in Season 1 when Chidi Anagonye, a professor of moral philosophy, dropped this zinger:
Any moment now, Michael is going to get on that train, and we will never see him again, just like Professor Lindeman after I asked him to reread my 3,600-page manuscript. He said he was going out for cigarettes, but then he just left his tenured position at the Sorbonne.
Non-academics won’t find this the funniest joke of the show, but it was definitely in my Top 5.
For those who don’t know, the Sorbonne is one of the most prestigious universities in the world. It is very hard for…
