This post will contain the key reveal/spoiler from Season One of NBC’s unusual sitcom The Good Place, now starting its third season last week.
The Good Placeis a sitcom concerning Eleanor Shellstrop, a woman who clearly did not lead a good life, she was vain, bitter, and self-serving, and who finds herself in the afterlife in ‘the good place,’ a reward for virtuous people. Most of the first season operates in and around Eleanor as she strives to become a better person and earn her spot in the good place. Along the way she collects a group of friends and they both torture each other with their conflicting personalities and improve each through their friendship. When season one concludes Eleanor realizes that the ‘good place’ has been the ‘bad place’ all along and that their ‘caring’ architect Michael is actually the eternal being that designed this unusual torture for them.
In season two, for reasons of his own, Michael joins with the afterlife humans, working against his former demons, and conspires to help the humans escape to the actual good place. Over the course of the season Michael gradually becomes a better being growing a sense of empathy, compassion, and affection for his friends.
The Good Place, in addition to farcical character driven humor, is deeply concerned with ethical decision-making and entire episodes are built around a single ethical question or dilemma. Many famous philosophers, Kant, Hegel, Plato, etc, are mentioned and their core concepts used as vital elements in understanding the thorny issues of what makes a person good and how do you know what is a good act. Absent from the roster of thinkers is Frederick Nietzsche. On the surface this is not a surprise. Nietzsche is famous for his nihilism and is often attributed with philosophy that emphasizes an individual’s will over any absolute morality. And yet at 5:00 am this morning when I awoke to biological needs it suddenly struck me that from Season Two that there was a very Nietzscheian element in plain sight. Consider one of Nietzsche’s most famous quotes.
Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into the abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.
Prolonged contact with evil can make you evil and that very nature can stealthily seep into you, but is the inverse also true? It seems to me that one aspect of season two can be the application of the sentiment ‘Whoever fights angles should see to it that he does not become an angel.’ Michael’s closes association with humans, over nearly a thousand reboots of his good place torture village, as they strove to continually improve themselves, profoundly altering his very nature. Late in the second season Michael’s transformation is so complete that self sacrifices in order to save his human friends. Truly he gazed into the heavens until the heavens gaze back into him.
The Good Placeavoids taking any religious stand, it makes no preference for Christian, Jewish, Islamic, or any other of the major religions but rather keeps it focus on the ethics action and the question of what does it mean to be good? It is a show that places ‘Lonely Lady Margarita Mix’ jokes right next to discussion of Utilitarianism and how many major network shows pull that off?
