When Michael Schur created The Good Place, he intended for the comedy to explore what it meant to be a good person, but has revealed how and why the message has changed as they enter their fourth season.
According to Entertainment Weekly, Schur explained at the Television Critics Association’s summer press tour, how the intention of the show evolved over time and perhaps even hinted at what the ultimate message of the show will be.
The show started with Chidi (William Jackson Harper) attempting to teach Eleanor (Kristen Bell) about ethics and being a good person. Down the line, they (along with Jameela Jamil’s Tahani, Manny Jacinto’s Jason and D’Arcy Carden’s Janet) try and help demon architect Michael (Ted Danson) find his humanity after it’s revealed they’re actually in the Bad Place.
Later, the group tries to prove Michael’s theory that humans can evolve in a fate-deciding experiment. It’s also revealed that no one has actually been entering the Good Place for hundreds of years.
“I pitched the show as an investigation of what it meant to be a good person, and found over the course of working on it with the writers and the actors and the entire crew that that’s even a more complicated question than I think I thought it was,” Schur said.
“I thought at the beginning that the show could, if given the chance, describe what it meant to be a good person. That was my hope. And that didn’t mean ‘Do this and not that.’ It meant ‘Here’s what a good person looked like in the world. Here’s how a person can feel like he or she led a good life.’
“At the end of the day, that objective kind of shifted a little bit. Because what we found as we discussed it and wrote it and executed it is that some very, very smart people over the last, say, 3,000 years have had a lot of very different opinions about that question.”
Schur and his team of writers soon realised that the most important thing was that we actually try to be good people.
He added, “So what the mission of the show then became was to say, ‘Okay, we’re going to give you a bunch of options. You can be a good person this way or you can try to be a good person this way.’ And what we ended up saying is ‘We’re going to present a bunch of options, and by the way, there are plenty more we didn’t describe, but what’s important is that you try one of them.’
“That was my internal shift over the course of making the show: the newfound belief that the important thing wasn’t actually — and it’s counterintuitive to say this — being good. The important thing was that you’re trying.”
He went on to say that he believes the problem in today’s society is that not enough of us are actually trying, because trying means failing.
“Everybody fails all the time; even people with the best of intentions will fail. It doesn’t matter whether you follow this theory or that theory, or this belief or whatever. You’re going to fail a lot. We all fail all the time at this.
“So… at the beginning I pitched what it means to be a good person. And at the end I would describe this as a show that makes the argument that we all ought to try harder than we are. And as long as you’re trying, you’re on the right path.”
The final season of The Good Place will kick off on September 26.