Without spoiling too much for those not completely caught up, it seems like Eleanor and the others are — finally — going to be spending some time in the good place when they return to TV in the new year.
I’m not sure though: I think it’ll be hard to portray the good place in a comedy. Here are three reasons for thinking that the gang won’t be living it up in heaven in 2019.
Comedy, you might think, arises from out of placeness. A character’s wants are out of place with their station in life (Homer wants to sleep but he’s doing jury duty), a joke ends with a word you weren’t expecting (‘I’ve decided to start taking something for my kleptomania’), the cat is in a glass but cats shouldn’t be in glasses. In heaven there’s no out of placeneness, so heaven isn’t funny, so heaven won’t appear much in a comedy show.
Here’s a more positive reason for thinking this. One of the sources of comedy in The Good Place is what it puts in the bad place. Here are a couple taken from this list
— The first person to floss in an open-plan office
— The first waiter to
approach a table of diners with an empty plate and sarcastically say, “I guess
you hated it.”
We get the joke: these are kind of annoying things and it’s funny that you would be forced to suffer a life of eternal damnation on account of them. But here’s a weird thing: trying to make a similar joke but switching out good place for bad place doesn’t work. We’d be looking for mildly good things that don’t warrant an eternity of happiness.
Imagine Michael telling Eleanor the sort of people she can expect to find in the good place:
— The first person to bring their office mate donuts ‘just because’
— The
first person to politely listen someone recount their dream all the way through
Maybe I’m not funny enough to think of decent examples, but I don’t think Michael saying these or similar things would make for a funny scene.
Similarly, another source of humour is got by listing very extreme torture methods in the bad place, like:
— Butthole spiders
— Penis flattener
Can we imagine similarly very extreme nice things in the good place? Would it work to hear Michael tell Eleanor she can look forward to the below?
— Mountains of puppies
— Infinite ice-cream
I don’t think so. And again, it could be that I’m just bad at thinking of examples. But it suggests to me that extremely bad things are funny but extremely good things aren’t. I find that weird, unexpected, and interesting.
(It can be tempting, when thinking about such things, to say to yourself: well yeah obviously there’s this difference between good and bad, and then think about it no more. The puzzle is why it’s obvious.)
Some good and bad things according to The Good Place. Is it just me or are the bad ones funnier? Except the Houston one, that’s pretty good.
You’ve probably heard the above quotation, or perhaps you’ve heard the writing advice that the most important thing for your story is that your character wants something.
Drama in general, it seems, arises from conflict, want, and in general lacking. In heaven, you’re not lacking anything, so heaven is hard to portray in stories.
And actually, looking at Western literature arguably you kind of see this. The most famous work about heaven and hell, Dante’s Divine Comedy, spends a lot of time in heaven watching people get tortured, but kind of jumps the shark when Dante gets to heaven, and Dante himself gives up on the task of trying to describe God. The second most famous work, Milton’s Paradise Lost, which was meant to be, in general, pro-God, has instead captivated most readers with its portrayal of a bad-ass Satan who is much more interesting than the deity. And given this is a philosophical show, it’s worth pointing out one of the most famous lines from Jean Paul Sartre’s play *Huis Clos, *‘hell is other people’, and in particular it’s the everyday squabbles and tensions we have with those close to us. If that is so, then unless Eleanor and the others are going to stop squabbling and having tension with each other — unlikely — we won’t see them in heaven.
It’s arguable, then, that Western literature bears out the claim that heaven is hard to portray, and so The Good Place writers have an uphill battle ahead of them.
What would heaven look like in The Good Place? Well, there are two options: it could be a one-size fits all deal, experienced the same by everyone, or it could be different for its different residents.
I don’t think it can be a one-size fits all deal. People would complain, and perhaps with reason. If heaven consisted of nuclear families living normal, happy lives, those of a more spiritual bent wouldn’t be happy, while if it consisted of people meditating and praying — ignoring the fact this wouldn’t be funny — the secular would complain. To take a stance on the good place is to take a stance on the good life, and that’s too controversial for a sitcom.
But, anyway, you might think, that idea was a non-starter. Judging by the first episodes of the show — if we can trust them — the good place is particularized to each resident. So we should expect the actual good place to be like that. The problem is, in a sense, it’s been done. We’ve already seen this in the first season and so it wouldn’t be sufficiently interesting to go back to it. I kind of think in this respect the writers might have painted themselves into a corner: to be interesting, their heaven can be neither general nor particular, so it can’t be anything.