Many adults still act like children. Some routinely; others only on their bad days. When you see someone lashing out impulsively or defensively when they argue with you, it can be helpful to step back and see their inner child to put their behavior into perspective.
This is not the same as agreeing with them: they still may be wrong. But seeing their tantruming inner child can help you understand what needs they feel are not being met and are causing them to lash out. This can be something you address directly. Figuring out a workable way to acknowledge and maybe address that need within the bounds of your own goals can be a practical way to get through the moment, especially when they are in a position of authority over you. This usually slows them down and helps deescalate the situation.
At the very least, it can help empathize with them. Empathizing is not the same as agreeing, nor is it the same as allowing or enabling any inappropriate behavior they may be doing. It is understanding their behavior enough to see the human inside, often a series of needs screaming to be heard, and confronting it directly. Even if your empathy is not safe to show in the moment or if they reject your empathy, empathetically acknowledging the feelings of another is about maintaining your own humanity and not allowing another’s behavior to curb your ability to acknowledge and address the humanity of others around you.
So, how can this help you respond? Others have spoken at length about how to use understanding to negotiate and reduce conflict (see this for example). One can use empathy to diffuse a situation by acknowledging their side, to demonstrate mutual self-respect, or if necessary, to set proper boundaries for one’s own needs.
Pausing to reflect on the needs the other has can help remove you from the intensity of the situation, which would help you form the nuanced response necessary. It can allow you to understand not only their needs, but your needs and develop an effective strategy for how to meet those needs in the moment. Often, when someone seems to come after us, our bodies move immediately into a reactive, defensive response. The perceived threat puts us into “go mode” and taking an extra second to understand empathetically gives us the space to pull back, assess the situation anew, and use both our emotions and reason to develop a better, strategic response.
Instead of launching, you pause and force yourself to think about it from their perspective, sometimes you realize aspects of your behavior that you do need to address. Worst case scenario, after you reflect for a bit, you still conclude that you are wrong, and in that situation, taking a step back allows you to help confirm that, and you are now in a better mental space to respond appropriately.
Eleanor helps comfort Tahinni through her family trauma.
This is my final article reflecting on the Good place (see the previous article and my whole series). It’s been an insightful ride. To be clear, the Good Place is one of my favorite sitcoms, both for breaking new ground in what is possible in a sitcom and for encouraging people to think through what it might look like to truly heal from wrongs in an afterlife. Yet I think its ending leaves something crucial out: only individuals receive resolution and improvement in the afterlife itself, denying any kind of collective rectification of the moral problems facing our world.
In the show, the main group of characters manage to reconfigure the afterlife from a punitive system where literally every human in the last 500 years gets eternally tortured in the Bad Place to a refining system where each individual must work through their moral failings so they are able to join all other perfected individuals in the Good Place. This changes the thinking around justice in itself from one of punishment to self-improvement for all.
One could analyze this shift in itself, but here, I will focus on a crucial aspect of justice that this leaves out: any discussion of rectification of the world to resolve the problems we have created. Broadly speaking, this rectification could look like seeking to fix or repair what an individual has destroyed through one’s immoral acts and more broadly like trying to resolve the structural issues built on the accumulation of immoral and destructive decisions by multiple humans. They get let out entirely in the show’s resolution. Instead, the show’s new afterlife implicitly encourages individuals to focus on themselves as the exclusive or primary focus of what it means to develop morally. Let’s break them down further through some examples.
One day when I was a little boy, I did not want to eat whatever my mom served me for dinner that day, so what did I do? When she went to the kitchen for a second, I threw it all on the floor. When my mom returned, not only did she scold me for throwing my dinner on the floor, but she made me clean it up. As part of rectifying what I did, I had to clean up the mess I made. There could be many situations where fully rebuilding what was destroyed due to the immoral life is impossible (arguably full rectification is never possible), but a person who has done something wrong and feels guilty for it will often try to do the best they can to repair things for whoever they hurt through their actions.
Now this also applies at a larger scale. Humans have collectively built systems that destroy the environment and impoverish many through stifling inequality, and to fully make up for these, we also need to collectively repair their damage. But in The Good Place, all individuals no longer have to fix the problems they create once they die from that when they die. Once they die, they get to go through their own inner perfection and go to the Good Place, even if the systems they were a part of while alive remain just as destructive on earth. As a matter of fact, they would have to undergo an internal transformation after they die whether they do anything to fix the damage they have caused, meaning that the damage they caused does not end up mattering to their existence anyways.
Any positive reformation of anything in this world does not matter in the reformed afterlife system they created at the end of the series. Take, for example, an individual who commits some kind of atrocity, ranging in severity from a parent abusing one’s children or an orchestrator of a mass genocide. That person dies, enters their purgatory, which presumably teaches them the error of their ways and makes them into a better person, and then they go to heaven. That’s great for them, but they do not need to take any concrete action in the world itself to deal with or fix the intense suffering their actions have caused. Genocides and even abusive parents unleash cascading suffering into the world (both to humans and nonhumans) that can take several generations to heal. The show makes clear that the victims of atrocities from others will experience a healing during the afterlife, but that is long after the fact. Why must they suffer in the first place?
Healing occurs only by literally removing people from their environment into a make-believe world. For example, both Tahani and her sister experience healing from the trauma of their parents’ constant abuse, which allows them to overcome their lifelong competition between each other. They then get to experience positive relationships with each other and their parents all as healed people. Instead of fixing their relationship dynamics together, their reformation seemed to occur in their individual purgatories, where they presumably learned the error of their ways and grew as people (with the entire show being Tahani’s transforming state). In the show, they did not know what the others would be like after getting through their purgatories demonstrating that they were not together in any of it. This is innovative in many ways, but its portrayal of healing is entirely individualistic. Each human goes through purgatory in isolation outside of the social systems in which they existed and both created their virtues and vices. For example, for a familial conflict like this, I would love to see them go through purgatory together, probably in a way that changed some of the unfair power dynamics latent in the abuse and resolved everything together.
Also, what about non-human entities that suffered? For example, there is no reformation or healing in this system to animals that humans caused to suffer. A dog abused or neglected by its owner presumably was left on earth to die with no redemption. It also ignores any healing to the suffering of more collective entities like human communities and the environment. Instead of the humans experiencing renewal in a make-believe purgatory, I would love to see humans have to come back to the earth (maybe as some kind of ghost or other supernatural spirit) to reform the suffering their actions have caused in this world to mitigate how much suffering future humans and the environment in this world have to suffer. For example, if someone led a genocide, they would have to spend the next part of their afterlife healing all the damage this caused the world since. As a child, if I spilled something on the floor, my parents, as part of me having to learn my lesson, usually made me help clean it up, instead of whisking me into another room for a lesson, and then sending me on my way.
All of this points to its human-centered individualistic view that does not consider any systematic change to society or the ecological world and ignores the plight of animals and other nonhumans in this world as inferior and cosmically irrelevant. All that is necessary for “moral” perfection is a change in the characters of individual humans, which ignores the calls for systematic justice in both the social and environmental contexts. Even though The Good Place takes a courageous step in the right direction in helping people rethink justice, I think if we were to reimagine the afterlife to better address the injustices of humans, it would need to include the entire world and involve a fuller rectification of what humans have destroyed in this world.
I recently rewatched “The Good Place” (spoiler warning), one of my favorite shows from the last ten years, and I noticed so much more about the show the second time around. I decided to write a miniseries analyzing different facets of the show – some complimentary, some critical – as a tribute to one of the most thoughtful and interesting sitcoms on mainstream US television. Here are the previous reflection and the next reflection in the series.I hope you enjoy.
I find it fascinating that at the end of the series, “The Good Place” ends up advocating a form of optional annihilationism. Annihilationism is, broadly speaking, a form of the afterlife where persons (their souls, essences, or whatever you want to call what them) ceases to exist. It mostly refers to an idea within some forms of Christianity that God makes the damned cease to exist instead of eternal torment hell like most Christians argue. The Seventh-Day Adventist Church, for example, has historically advocated this view.
The Good Place’s annihilationism is rather different: the humans in heaven/Good Place can choose to cease to exist whenever they get tired of heaven. After they have chosen to complete all they want to, they can cease to exist, where their self gets “recycled” back into the universe through what seems like a vague form of reincarnation. In the show, the eternity of heaven made it into a type of hell: no matter what people did, they continued to exist for all time. The never-ending accumulation of experiences eventually made everyone there feel lethargic like their mind was in a fog. They would indulge themselves in gratifying activities (like for a scholar, learning about whatever she wants), but no matter how long she does this for, there is still an infinite length afterwards. Eventually within this eternity, she forgot almost everything she learned and started doing the minimal amount necessary to function each day. In response to this, ceasing to exist was a potential release. Whenever they have become who they want to be and done all they want to do in Paradise, however long that takes, they can choose to cease to exist. The show implies that pretty much all humans (with Tahini being the only potential exception) will eventually choose to not exist in this way.
This is a very interesting idea. Would this be what an eternal existence in the afterlife would feel like? To answer that question, one would have to determine who or what we would be in such an afterlife, and based on that, to what extent would our present psychology apply to this “self” there. These are not simple questions. Many views of the afterlife chronicle some kind of change to who we are, both as individuals and collectively as a species, which raises all sorts of other questions. One big one is, If we do change, how can we know that these “changed selves” are really us and not a new entity in a new world based on ourselves? I am not sure we could ultimately answer these questions without experiencing existence in this fundamentally changed way, so instead of trying to weigh into those debates, I will focus on the implications of the Good Place’s answer to our current temporal existence.
The Good Place’s answers take cues from human psychology in this world where limited time produces important constraints that shape our desires and motivations. In many ways, our minds seem built to keep us through conflicts and tribulations. These can range from the overarching life goals that span years, decades, or even one’s entire life to mid-term quests that take maybe a few months to complete to daily needs or challenges. For this, time itself plays a major role in defining and setting constraints on these conflicts. Humans do seem very goal-oriented: we produce goals and actively strive to do specific things in the quest to resolve the conflicts we face.
A lot of psychology literature seems to indicate that these goals give us meaning and orient our lives. When we don’t have enough to do, boredom kicks in, stimulating us to go out and determine new activities with new potential conflicts to overcome and goals to attain. Now, rest is also crucial psychologically, and people can try to do too much. Workaholics, for example, may constantly try to do more and more without taking sufficient time to rest. Among other problems, this can lead them not giving sufficient time to reflect, which best happens when you slow down and pause your inner drive. But, Our drives still keep us centered in who we are, and humans tend to be most satisfied when balancing rest and activity.
All of this seems very adaptive to our current lives. Here we need to actively pursue things in order to survive yet ultimately have a limited amount of time on earth to complete what we set out to. The Good Place’s heaven demonstrates how connected our psychology is to such an existence by showing how if you remove finiteness from our lives, suddenly these human psychological drives don’t make sense. Heaven removed people from conflict to survive; they don’t have to make sure they eat, drink, sleep, and do other activities to stay alive. This leaves only goals they actively choose to pursue. It makes perfect sense that this would not be able to last eternally. Our own passions in this world (including our curiosity and desire to learn more) were adapted to keep us going for a finite number of years. In the show, most supernatural beings seem content to exist eternally, but humans would have to become a seismically different being to become like them.
That is my main takeaway from the Good Place’s argument in favor of the “annihilationist option.” Trying to analyze to what extent it is an accurate or necessary depiction of a good afterlife would be too difficult, since we do not know enough about the supposed afterlife in the first place. In particular, we do not know enough about what human persons in any so-called afterlife would be to tell whether such a move would benefit or otherwise be necessary for those humans. But, through its contrast with our current existence, it makes a statement about how our current psychology seems adaptive to our finite existence. What would curiosity or the desire to have fun look like without our physical needs? As much as we in Western culture like to separate these supposedly “higher pursuits” from our physical needs, I am not sure we could have them in a way similar to how we think of them now without our current constraints of time and potential death.
I recently rewatched “The Good Place” (spoiler warning), one of my favorite shows from the last ten years, and I noticed so much more about the show the second time around. I decided to write a miniseries analyzing different facets of the show – some complimentary, some critical – as a tribute to one of the most thoughtful and interesting sitcoms on mainstream US television. Here are the previous reflection and next reflection in the series.I hope you enjoy:
The Good Place’s vision of personality reform is certainly innovative: Humans upon death go to a type of purgatory where a group of supernatural beings (made up of both demons and angels) force them to confront their biggest flaws and grow as people. Once these imperfections have been fixed, and they have been perfected, they get to go to heaven, where they can enjoy the remainder of their existence. This seems like an improvement from torturing everyone for all time that modern humans endured up to that point, but it still feels insufficient. This reflection will use the social philosopher Michel Foucault to analyze this new system.
A good starting point is to ask, “What are someone’s flaws, and how can we be certain that another can both know these flaws and put them in a situation where they must confront and fix their flaws?” These flawed supernatural beings can objectively know someone’s flaws and with enough time (not a problem in the infinite afterlife) eventually chisel humans down until they change who they are in a way that addresses that flaw. The show thus answers yes to both of these, but I find both ideas, especially the first, rather debatable.
The show presents this as good, because everyone eventually gets to go to heaven, and sure, such a universalism is certainly better than universal damnation, but it ignores the complexity of determining someone’s fundamental flaw. What if the supernatural beings have it wrong, interpreting something as a flaw that is not? Does a person’s flaws exist objectively in the first place? For example, historical figures receive intense debate about what about their lives are “good” or “bad”, virtues or vices, understandable, criticizable, or somewhere in the middle? On a practical level, these same beings had been so unable to empathize with humanity that they condemned all modern humans to damnation. How could such creatures really work through the complexities of a person’s entire life to weed out their weeds and their chaff? The sitcom depicts them as a positive, lively reform, but in say a horror, supernatural beings that use their control over us to try to remake us into what they desire would be nightmare fuel.
Let’s consider what Michel Foucault, the French philosopher in the middle of the 1900s, would have to say about this. He extensively analyzed how modern Western societies focused on human reform, in order to “improve” people, fix their flaws, and make them supposedly useful or productive members of society. One key example is his book, “Discipline and Punishment,” where he discusses a shift in modern Europe a few hundred years ago from the state publicly and violently beating and executing criminals to a focus on locking them into reforming prisons to reteach them, all to remake them into useful members of society. For him, the punishment of criminals shifted from a vagrant punishment for daring to defy the government and the society at large by doing crime, an intense yet skin-deep attack on their bodies, towards the more “civilized” prisons, where instead of intense, physical violence but must experience the thousand little cuts of the state trying to reform the prisoners’ very selves.
The beings in the show make the exact same change. The demons of hell tortured humans with brutal physical violence (like forcing strange creatures into their butts and genitals), relishing their power over the humans’ bodies. The torture was extensive seemingly to punish people for their evilness. The new system, however, focuses on reforming their very selves, in order to fix their flaws. In the episode where the demons learn how to construct these learning experiences, they teach the demons how to use each human’s flaws to psychologically torture them: to put the human in high-pressure situations where they must encounter their biggest psychological insecurities, all in the name of reforming them. This may have a pragmatic pedagogical strategy to wean the demons off the mentality and slowly over the course of the lessons encouraging more positive ways to engage with people’s flaws, but either way, this illustrates how spiritually dark the idea of forcibly reforming people can become.
Now these differ from the states that Foucault in important ways. The Medieval and early modern European states that Foucault wanted to warn against threatening their social order by making a public spectacle of mutilating their bodies; in contrast to the demons seemed to do so partially to entertain and humiliate and partially because they thought the humans they were torturing were incorrigibly awful and deserved to suffer for it. More importantly, the new purgatory state at the end of the series was decidedly not a punishment but a refinement, and after they passed through it, each human got to live in heaven on their own terms for their own ends, not to benefit the community, in contrast to the idea of remaking prisoners into productive members of society.
At the same time, however, it is not a coincidence that the show writers would construct a similar process to a reformist prison. They are subconsciously tapping into the similar energy that Foucault was analyzing in contemporary Western societies. This energy makes the idea of changing people into what everyone else considers the best versions of them. It can also manifest as an energy to pressure people into optimizing themselves to perfect themselves either for their own good or the good of their communities, and contrasts with, say, the idea of engaging with people how they are and take collective responsibility for our role in shaping the so-called “bad people” into who they have become. My question is, Would such an afterlife, where supernatural beings who have absolute control over our entire selves (including of our very consciousness and memories) and use that control to remake us how they see fit, really be such a good world after all?
I recently rewatched “The Good Place” (spoiler warning), one of my favorite sitcoms in this century so far, and I noticed so much more about the show the second time around. I decided to write a miniseries analyzing different facets of the show – some complimentary, some critical – as a tribute to one of the most thoughtful and interesting sitcoms on mainstream US television. I hope you enjoy:
Organizational change is a quiet yet constant theme in “The Good Place”. Its explicit discussion of philosophy, ethics, justice, and the afterlife get more attention, but at the end of the day, the series’ plot mostly revolves around a series of organizational changes within the complex and traditionalist afterlife bureaucracy.
Through all of this, the characters’ primary conflict is convincing the established bureaucracy to refine the system. In this quest, Michael is the primary protagonist. He consistently advocates for organizational change throughout the series, starting as an innovative form of torture and morphing into a reform of the entire afterlife system.
Often the show creates one specific “leader” character to personify the system itself. Being in charge, this is the sole character they must convince, a move which not only gives a tangible strategy to enact their goals (they must convince this stubborn leader) but also a symbolic representation of the system itself. These leaders start complacent in the system unwilling to listen to its problems, very realistic for anyone who has tried to enact organizational change. Four such leader characters represent the types of complacency in the system:
1) “Not my problem” with the Head Accountant: The head of the cosmos’s accounting department (primarily tasked with creating the supposedly objective points system that damns all modern humans. When confronted with the problem, he responds that the system is objective and cannot be wrong. When pushed on that, his basic response is, “It’s not my problem.” He and the accounting department have a job/role, and such a change goes beyond their directives. Thus, it is the problem of whoever else is in charge of that.
2) Slow, ineffective action by the Head “Angel” of the Good Place: This character is in charge of the Good Place, along with a team of angelic beings. He listens to the team’s concerns and believes them unequivocally. He raises the alarm bells to do something, but his (and his angelic team’s) plans are too slow to be of much use. Developing a committee (including developing a committee to develop the committee), then more time to develop the name of the committee, and then after an even longer to research the matter before in effect writing a strongly worded memo to the powers-that-be to look into this.
3) Anger towards Change by the Head Demon: The Head Demon of the Bad Place, who serves as the primary antagonist for most of the show, represents the visceral anger towards institutional change and the desire to continue doing things as they always have. He tortures other characters for fun (including abusing his power as head demon to torture his own demon minions after they are done helping him). His anger manifests as visceral anger to those around him, personifying the often angry pushback for things to remain the same (which just so happens to be violent torture in this context) that occurs during attempts to make organizational change. At the end of the show, he finally concludes that torturing is boring, unfulfilling, and that he is unhappy, the only reason he is willing to agree to the change.
4) The Judge’s lack of empathy: When confronting the problem with the judge, she responds with a basic response of “Well, that’s just how it is.” This embodies the empathetic response one also finds when trying to advocate for change. She is not the only one; multiple supernatural beings fundamentally do not understand human existence, existing in their eternal state unaware of experientially what life is like on planet earth. Because of this, they cannot understand the difficulty of what life is like in the “real world” (aka human world) and the system developed did not take into consideration the complexities of life on earth. Embodying a perspective removed from the ground, bureaucracies and other organizations often oversimplify complex phenomena from their vantage point into easy to quantify metrics in a way that filters out the nuance and humanity of the individuals involved.
The cure for this lack of empathy is to inhabit the human world and experience what it is like to be a human. Even though most of the supernatural being’s exhibit this lack of empathy (with the potential exception being the angels discussed in 2, who are empathetic and willing to make a change, just ineffective), the Judge actually becomes empathetic, by going to Earth and living there for a time. This causes her to realize how complex life is and how unfair the afterlife system is. The show portrays walking in another’s shoes as the best way to cultivate empathy, and such empathy as being necessary to understand the faults inherent in the bureaucratic machine.
All of this demonstrates the complexities of organizational change. Modern sitcoms do not usually handle the intricate themes of organizational change within bureaucratic structures, and I am glad that the Good Place does. Though the show often lessens the intricacies of organizational change by narrowing them into a conversation with a few head leaders. The characters egregiously break the rules of the system until the leader of the system comes to accept such actions as necessary, rule-breaking common in Hollywood that would probably not fly in the real world. The sitcom format may be difficult to portray the slow minutiae and give-and-take that real-life organizational change often requires, so to me, that is forgivable.
Its take on the forces that oppose organizational change is accurate and compelling even if how they overcome them was unrealistic. I found it refreshing that a show decided to discuss these forces in the first place.
I recently rewatched “The Good Place” (spoiler warning), one of my favorite shows from the last ten years, and I noticed so much more about the show the second time around. I decided to write a miniseries analyzing different facets of the show – some complimentary, some critical – as a tribute to one of the most thoughtful and interesting sitcoms on mainstream US television. Here is the next reflection in the series.I hope you enjoy:
In this first reflection of The Good Place, I will describe how the sitcom covertly portrays slides in a discussion of the process of making a sitcom itself. Metatextual commentary and humor is “in” right now in popular US media, or at least during the years the show came out. This includes fourth wall breaks, discussions of the tropes of a show’s/movie’s genre within the work itself, shows about making shows, etc., but the Good Place had a clever way to embed some of the central tensions in writing a show into the story itself, allowing characters to reflect and confront them directly.
To understand how, we first must discuss how mainstream TV sitcoms get made. Usually, the writers have one or a small group of main characters. Each has a lovable or entertaining flaw that limits them in engaging and interesting ways. For example, Homer Simpson is an idiot; Michael Scott in The Office wants love and adoration, and George Costanza in Seinfeld worries about trivial matters. Out of this fundamental flaw emerge both endearing traits and other sub-flaws that produce a more fleshed out character (more details on this process here).
The show writers then create a world that constantly rubs up against this fundamental flaw that brings it out in dramatic and hilarious ways. The writers develop the conflict in each episode and the other cast of characters who inhabit the world (both major and minor) in ways that maximize that conflict with the main casts’ fundamental flaw (e.g. Michael’s family in Arrested Development seem almost hand-picked to bring out his judgmental yet enabling nature). This forms the show’s backbone, the basic structure that each episode replicates. Structurally, all other phenomena in the show (like witty one-liners) generally flow out of this premise.
The Good Place crafts this very structure into the premise of the story world itself. In the first season, the show takes a more conventional sitcom approach. The characters are in a world with tension that demonstrates their fundamental flaw:
1) Eleanor is in an afterlife she does not deserve, which inadvertently harms everyone else there. This high stakes environment highlights her fundamental flaw of self-centeredness.
2) Chidi becomes embroiled in helping her, forcing him to make complex philosophical decisions, which highlights his fundamental flaw of indecisiveness
3) Tahini is given an elite role in the Good Place but frequently has to push to demonstrate and maintain that role, which highlights her fundamental flaws of insecurity and elitism
4) Jason is given the role of a silent monk, conflicting with and thus highlighting his natural fundamental flaw of impulsiveness.
From the perspective of these characters and first-time viewers, these conflicts over how to stay in the Good Place (or at least avoid the Bad Place) while fixing the issues their presence produces are “real,” but by the end of the first season, that turns out to be a ruse. Instead, their flaws have caused them to be condemned in the Bad Place where demons have intentionally constructed this universe antagonize each character’s flaw and torture them for their entertainment.
One interpretation I have is that these demons embody the sitcom developers. The writers are the ones who take advantage of the characters’ flaws, constructing artificial scenarios that directly pull at those flaws, for the sake of entertainment. This becomes most explicit in the first part of the second season where Michael and his demons intentionally design each detail of their world to exploit their flaws. That is the process of writing a sitcom in a nutshell. The torturous world they build can be seen as a type of “live-in” TV set, composed of various sets (such as yoghurt cafes and a clown-based home decor) to annoy the characters and then create conflicts to antagonize these personality weaknesses.
Only, the characters eventually realize the artificiality of their world, concluding that this must actually be The Bad Place. This forces the demons to reset each’s memories and start over. This parallels sitcoms, especially episodic sitcoms where each episode is a stand-alone entity. Sitcoms, especially classic sitcoms from the era before streaming services of regular television networks, tend to involve no or little character change. Within each episode, the characters may or may not go through a series of character developments, making them a different person at the end of it, but between episodes, they are usually right back to who they started with the same flaws as before. This way the same types of conflicts can unfold in each new episode with different specific details.
In the Good Place, this becomes tedious overtime and ultimately fails. The demons become increasingly exasperated at the constant repetition of enacting the same type of story over and over. And the human characters eventually realize how this world is an artificial facade. This represents how nauseatingly repetitive sitcoms can feel overtime. Even though I did not watch enough media at the time to analyze this in-depth, but I tended to see a pattern in the 2010s of shows reflecting on the constant churn of repetitive content, and I think as streaming services enabled TV shows to become more serialized, encouraging greater degrees of character growth, several media explored the repetitiveness of classic sitcoms in particular. The Good Place seems to be an example of this.
As the “producer” of these hell episodes, the head demon Michael seems to represent the show’s progression the most. In a way, he is the main protagonist of the story, since he progresses the most throughout the show and does the most to shape the cosmos around him. Over the course of the show, he grows from a demon exploiting their weaknesses for torture to working with them to avoid his own “damnation” to genuinely caring about their wellbeing and ability to get into the Good Place to fighting to reshape the entire afterlife to be more fair and lifegiving for all humanity. Throughout the show, he is a visionary whose vision shapes the world of the show, whether envisioning a new way to torture humans or trying to change the entire afterlife.
All of this gave a platform for the characters to explicitly discuss the characters main flaws in the universe. In the beginning of the show, they did this by torturing them in hell, and as the show progresses and the plot centers on the characters getting into the Good Place, this shifts to them explicitly working through their flaws to become good. This happens in multiple cycles, ranging from the Judge’s tests to being sent back to earth to see whether they are different (a reuse of magical forgetting to make the characters go back to square one and have us see them work through their flaws again). Their character growth and reshaping of their afterlife world go hand-in-hand, paralleling them working through their flaws with changing their sitcom world and premise. Through these cyclic fits, relapses, and restarts, the main cast still make slow progress not only of their own characters but also of the very foundations of their world they inhabit.
