I loved S1 and somehow they were able to wring 3 good seasons out of such a thin and seemingly finite idea. S3 should have ended things with them going to the real good place and living happily ever after but it didn't. This season feels like they are out of good ideas. Chidi and Tahani are being underutilized. Eleanor being in charge doesn't make any sense from a character or story standpoint.
shareI agree insofar as season four was the weakest of the four seasons, but I think they did need a final challenge before "making it". Earth wasn't enough for them to get in. I do wish that they had done something more interesting with season four. The big mistake was, in my opinion, introducing the new humans. Simone didn't behave anything like herself from season three (of a necessity), Brent and John were just caricatures, and it just overburdened the show with characters to provide arcs to.
If they had followed the "Bad Place is sabotaging the system" idea that Michael had, they could have had a fun conspiracy theory show. Afterlife Manchurian Candidate or something. It would have kept the focus on the high stakes, philosophically-toned craziness that our four favourite humans (plus a demon, plus a not-a-girl) get up to.
If they didn't do that, they might have tried having the new humans in the experiment making Eleanor, Chidi, Jason, and Tahani start losing points again and find themselves in immortal peril.
Now, either way, I do think the show should have ended as they headed to the Good Place. The two episodes in the Good Place itself were...well, they were okay, but they did feel "epiloguey".
I wished we had found out it was Michael's hell all along and Eleanor, Cheady, etc., were all demons.
shareI would have hated that. I appreciate that the gag would be a bit of a scream and the audacity of it would be laudable, I suppose, but it would have felt cheap. First, because they made us invest in these characters and to take them away would be mean, but perhaps more importantly because they'd already played that trick once and if they had done it again it would have been a shark jump for sure.
Overall, while season four maybe wasn't the best version of the show (ironically, considering the Answer it presents), it was still better than a lot of other TV series and I enjoyed that they found a way to follow through on their premise. Lesser shows would have jerked us around for years, fumbling, always undoing the character's progress to draw the thing out. They had real arcs, plot and character development, and some really, really illustrative ways to go through moral philosophy. Plus it was super-funny. (Chris' reveal in S4 had me laughing so hard I had to pause it so I wouldn't miss anything).
I agree. I felt like they were committed to a metaphysics that didn't make any sense. The existence of Michael and Sean presupposes the existence of an actual boss (some kind of supreme being) who sets up the parameters of the good and bad places, but we end up with there being no there, there, as it were. I just felt like they decided to commit to an essentially atheist metaphysics (presumably the writers are atheists), which doesn't really make sense considering that the entire series holds, as true, that an afterlife exists.
shareThe show is more concerned with philosophy than theology. I read on wikipedia that Schur started with more heaven and hell stuff, but realised that the bedrock of the show was about philosophical debates and ethics not really theology.
I didn't mind that they weren't committing to a religious outlook (although it is funny that they said "Good Place" and "Bad Place" because they weren't heaven and hell, but they basically then describe heaven and hell).
The show was funny enough and clever enough with its consideration of moral philosophy that I'll grant it the latitude to have some loose rules around the Divine.
Yes I know what you mean. I think for me it was in the episode where they met the guy who had figured out the whole system and was living his life trying not to hurt bugs and snails that I was (internally) yelling at the screen, "It is impossible to earn salvation!"
Fun show, though. Ted Danson's evil laugh at the end of season 1 should go down in history as best evil laugh of all time. Truly brilliant.
They have to do similar smokescreens with the passage of time. I really like the "Jeremy Bearimy" thing where it's "explained"; it was rather like "Timey wimey stuff" in Doctor Who. A bit of that kind of line-blurring is necessary to get to the stories they want to tell. If they made the Judge operate in "Judge time", for instance - as omniscient and omnipotent as she should be - they would never be able to react at all to the Judge. On the other hand, they can't just say that time is spread out like an accordion for them or it would give them too much time in which to react, whereupon there would be a complete dispelling of tension.
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