Revolutionizing Sitcoms: “The Good Place’s” Unique Window into Making Television

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. 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.