"The Good Place," Year Four

Spoilers ahead.

After a bumpy third year of "The Good Place," and a season finale that seemed to send all the characters back to square one, I was worried about Season Four. The premise changed again, but more or less settled on the idea of our heroes trying to fix the afterlife, and more specifically on trying to use a Good Place neighborhood setup to reform a group of recently deceased humans, including gay gossip columnist John (Brandon Scott Jones), and the arrogant, overprivileged Brent (Ben Koldyke). And the season's first chunk of episodes were pretty strong as a result. The show brought back the weekly cliffhangers, shook up the character dynamics, and felt more of a piece with the early seasons. I liked the new characters, and wish we'd gotten more of them.

The second half of the season, however, left me far more mixed. I like that "The Good Place" has emerged as a series with these big, lofty ambitions, and that takes its themes of philosophy appreciation and moral questioning so seriously. However, within the confines of a sitcom structure, there was no way Mike Schur was going to wrap up everything and not have it feel too easy and too pat. One of my biggest issues with "The Good Place" since the second season is its habit of eliding over the rough bits - giving Michael a sped-up redemption, using a heightened, cartoony version of Earth instead of something more grounded, drastically simplifying major quandries, and never seeming to follow through on harsh consequences. The character development for all the leads also got pretty static after Chidi and Eleanor got together, and many of the complications and hurdles felt increasingly contrived.

I'm still trying to parse this, but after the finale I was left very unsatisfied. The series has never promised real profundity, and never passed up an opportunity for an easy laugh, but I was expecting more. Maybe it was because they were too explicit and literal and didn't leave enough cosmic mystery - even though the whole point of the ending was reintroducing a sense of cosmic mystery to "The Good Place." Maybe it was because the show's publicity campaigns seriously overpromised, and only delivered Lisa Kudrow and Timothy Olyphant as the season's big celebrity guest stars. Maybe it's because "The Good Place" conception of the universe just doesn't ring true to me in the end. Maybe it's because the finale was paced so slowly, and kept stuffing in more goodbyes, that that the whole thing kind of dragged.

Still, I liked that the ending was thoughtful and had a good sense of finality to it. The characters have been through enough that I've gotten attached to them and become invested in their fates. The answers to some of the big questions struck me as awfully convenient and not particularly well thought out. On the other hand, at least they were thorough and did a good job of cleaning up some of the numerous loose threads that the series has accumulated over multiple seasons. Also, the actors remain wonderfully committed. MVP award goes to William Jackson Harper, as Chidi is the only lead to really get anything interesting to do in the final set of episodes. He and Eleanor are one of the better screen couples of the past decade (Sorry Jason and Janet).

Looking back over the whole series, I'm still astonished that "The Good Place" aired on network television in the form that it did. There's so much I appreciate about it - the actors, the philosophy, the nutty humor, and the commitment to playing out its high-minded premise all the way through to the end. It's such a thoughtful, optimistic fantasy show in a television landscape that is too often cynical and defeatist. It's such an approachable piece of media too, making big ideas and concepts more digestible and relatable for its audience. I love that it's essentially a gateway for moral philosophy - and Jaguars fandom, of course.

On a personal note, it's also the end of an era for me. "The Good Place" was the very last currently running show on network television that I was watching weekly - and even then it was rarely live.
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