Navigating the Afterlife’s Red Tape: Bureaucracy, Empathy, and Organization Change in “The Good Place”

Part Two of my Good Place Series. Click here for Part One. 

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.