A lot of shows this past year have ended their runs evoking loss, mortality and death. I don’t know if this surge of sombre feeling has seeped into pop culture because the liberal west has moved away from organised religion and towards secularism and needs to plug the spiritual gap somehow, or because a lot of the most recent crop of show-runners are feeling their ages, but, whatever the reason, shows as various as The Deuce, The Affair, Preacher, The Haunting of Hill House, Mr Robot, and Legion have used their final bows to remind us of ours.
It came as no real surprise when The Good Place – RIP – carried on the trend. After all, it’s pretty hard to set a show in the afterlife and avoid evoking loss, mortality and death.
The genuinely surprising thing about the finale of The Good Place was just how hard it hit me in the tear ducts; harder than all of the other shows I mentioned in the first paragraph combined. Sure, The Good Place has made me leak ocular fluid before – most notably when Chidi’s memories of, and love for, Eleanor returned mid-way through the fourth season – but it’s never made me almost drown in the stuff before.
For many hours after the end credits had rolled I was left with an over-whelming sense of life’s fragility and finality. I was drunk on a potent cocktail of love, loss, joy and sadness, trying to blink back rivers of blinding tears and failing miserably. I couldn’t concentrate on reading a book the rest of that night, not one sentence; I couldn’t watch anything else on TV; I struggled to process and convey the sheer range of emotions I was feeling.
It felt like I’d been to the funeral of a beloved grandparent. This was grief. Real, actual grief: terrible; life-affirming; harrowing; beautiful. What the fork was going on?
This is… A comedy, right?
The Good Place – from the mind and fingers of Michael Schur, who co-created both Brooklyn Nine Nine and Parks and Recreation – has been one of my favourite comedies of recent years. It’s a perfect balance of farce, heart, slapstick, high-brow and low-brow humour, held together with whip-smart writing, hilariously detailed world-building, continually inventive and subversive twists, and, most importantly of all, a feast of rich and colourful, well-drawn characters who, by the end of the show’s run, feel like family: both each other’s and your’s.
Eleanor, Chidi, Jason and Tahani entered what they thought was heaven but was actually hell, teamed up with its architect, the demon Michael, to escape deliverance and chase redemption, uncovered an existential conspiracy borne of incompetence along the way, saved the world, learned how to be their best selves, and finally reached heaven – the titular Good Place – only to realise that it was more hellish than hell itself. It turns out that an eternity of butthole spiders and Richard Marx music isn’t nearly as blood-curdling a proposition as an eternity spent bereft of purpose and in possession of God-like powers.
The show raises as many laughs as it does questions. When you have the time and the power to do everything you want whenever you want, can anything in your life hold meaning? Is a life without struggle worth living? How long can we tolerate existence for existence’s sake?
In its final episode The Good Place eschews the whacky and the supernatural to make a convincing and beautiful case for humanism. Michael’s joy at being made human (his Pinocchio moment, his friends tell him) renews our own appreciation for the brief flash of existence each of us gets to call their own.
As each of the other characters either let go or level up, we’re left feeling a little less afraid of whatever it is that might lie behind that final door in the forest glade – whether we imagine ourselves as the ones walking through it, or the ones left behind to wonder.
The very last scene also suggests that the good we do in life, and beyond, will live on and touch the lives of others. I liked that, even if it seemed that humanity’s fate was to become benevolent space fertiliser.
The Good Place mulled over a great many theories and philosophies over its run, reflecting a shining kaleidoscope of pop culture in the process, but its finale left me most of all with a great and powerful impression of The Wizard of Oz.
Michael was the wizard with the booming voice, who ended up being a lot nicer and more humble than his disguise suggested (and it was such a good disguise that it took Michael a long time to realise he was even wearing one). Thanks to his love and devotion to Janet, Jason found his brain – or at least was able to teach his existing brain the value of patience and focus. Tahani found her heart. Chidi found his courage. And Eleanor found all three.
It was sad. It was beautiful.
It was perfect.
And did I mention it was forking funny?
There’s no place like The Good Place.
Take it sleazy, everyone.
