Save this article to read it later.
Find this story in your accountsSaved for Latersection.
Do they use money?
Ted Danson on why The Good Place is really about karma.
Who actually ran that froyo shop?
Will an individuals attempts to be kind, disciplined, and selfless even matter in the long run?
This year, big changes are coming toThe Good Place.
Read on forGood Placeanswers big and small.
I have so many questions about the afterlife.
Do people actually need to sleep in the afterlife?
Weve always said they dont have to.
If you didnt eat, your body wouldnt decay.
Its an infinite supply of everything.
Who works at the frozen yogurt places?
Who are the servers in the restaurants?
Is there an underclass of exploited workers?This was a big question for us.
If you dont have purpose, youre going to get real bored, real fast.
The idea was that one of the ways that people find purpose is through work.
Thats part of the way that people enjoy their existence.
Then theres a second level to that.
He made her a pizza shop owner, and they were pretending that they had certain passions.
But again, the answer to some of this is Janet.
I think the joke was like, Shirley Temple killed J.F.K.
I find it a little hard to believe that people would be like, You know what?
You know what I mean?But thats fine.
The idea would be, people could do that.
That store wouldnt be open.
Janets your fail-safe.Yeah, shes an omniscient repository for all the knowledge in the universe who can appear instantly.
Are there other Heavens?
Other neighborhoods?Yeah, the neighborhood system is real.
He approximates, but hes guessing.
Hell administration and heaven administration are completely separate?Never the twain shall meet, yeah.
Is there an administrative staff for the Medium Place?No, its a one-off.
Mindy St. Claires Medium Place was a one-of-a-kind compromise.
That actually helped us define Mindys character, because Mindy is the most selfish person in the universe.
She hasnt seen another person in 30 years and shed still rather be by herself.
Its solitary confinement, but its solitary confinement for a person who likes being alone at all costs.
The bureaucracy of Hell is really extensive.
Business is booming down there, so they need a lot of people.
Michaels original scheme to trick Eleanor and the others is elaborate.
And theres no money, right?
Certain resources, versions of what you would call capital, are limitless.
Theres no shortage of land or time or demons.
The idea is that Sean sees a chance to expand their options.
That can be a whole new wing of torture.
Multiple times, Janet has corrected people who call her a girl or a woman.
She says shes not those things.
Is she technically a nonbinary entity?
She happened, at a certain moment, to bond with Jason.
And the two of them bonded over just being nice to each other.
Im not sure, exactly.
Id be loath to actually make a run at define that what it means in terms of her orientation.
Remember, there are infinite Janets, too.
And that could change.That could change.
They were in a pretend Heaven being poked by an omniscient poker.
Theyre in a place where actions can have consequences.Exactly.
They are where they are being deliberately tested, very specifically, based on their personalities.
Michaels point was, they got much better.
Part of season three is tracking what happens on Earth.
Eleanor lived a fairly small, sheltered life in Phoenix, Arizona.
Chidi was an academic, but usually hid in his house instead of going out for the day.
So Judge Gen sees this as a contained burn.
Its a controlled experiment, as controlled as it could be.
They arent people who have a wide-ranging effect on the world.
They havent put Hitler back on Earth.
So now were going to send them back.
If I died, what wouldve my life been like?
How would people have remembered me?
Would I have been happy or satisfied with how I lived?
Maybe theyd go right back to being crappy.
Whatever the situation is, youre going to get a before and after.
Heres what they were before the moment of that mortality, and heres what happens after that happens.
Youre giving the show a new framework all the time.
How long can you sustain that?
So as we were creating a first season, we were talking about the second.
And then as we were talking about the second, we were talking about the third.
Then as weve been talking about the third, we were talking about the fourth.
At a certain point, there will be a moment where we cant do that anymore.
Theres no more whats next.
And at that point, well wrap it up.
But to answer your question, I dont think this isLaw & Order: SVUin terms of its length.
This show, from the beginning, has moved very quickly and chewed up ideas and not lingered.
And then weve just pulled the shoelaces tighter and tighter and tighter.
I dont think that the show would be good if we were pacing ourselves.
The whole point of this show in particular is that were trying to stay ahead of everybody.
Theres something almost nostalgic about the desire for a Medium Place.
Anytime theres two options, you get extremes because theres no nuance.
When everything is set up around a binary choice, then you get extreme separation.
I didnt like it when Netflix went to thumbs up or thumbs down for rating things.
The range of stars felt more accurate.Thats Eleanors argument, right?
Its hard to look at a persons life and say good or bad.
Its why she says there should be a Medium Place, like Cincinnati.
And its absolutely part of the big picture of this show.
The conception of the afterlife that split you into Are you good or bad?
Thats going to be the argument of the show when all is said and done.
You know, the Greeks had it right.
The Greeks were all aboutnothing in excess.
Thats pretty right on the money.
I mean, its hard to summarize the goal of human existence better than that.
Theyre not flexible and they have no exceptions.
I want to murder him.
Youre not allowed to lie.
Thats an insane position.
Another message seems to be, Implicitly trusting authority because its authority is wrong.
We started reading about psychology instead of just philosophy.
We did a lot of psychology discussion.
TheMilgram experimentsare the classic ones.
But Milgram wrote a response to them, which I personally loved.
The response was basically, You are angry because you dont like what this experiment said about humanity.
Youre only upset because I proved something dark and unpleasant about the human soul.
The heart of your show revolves around the idea that few people will get a good afterlife.
Well, is that true?
Theres no outside oppressive force holding me down.
Is it equally and exactly also true for a 11-year-old girl in rural Vietnam whose family is subsistence farming?
How can it be true that I get the same amount of points for the same actions?
The novelistJohn Scalzi wrote an essayabout this, based on the video-game concept of the lowest difficulty setting.Right.
Jason Mendoza compares all of this stuff to playingMadden NFLon rookie level or on All-Madden level.
You get the same points for that touchdown and thats not fair.
Theyre going back to Earth with the knowledge that their time on Earth almost ended.
And now the question is, Okay, what do you now?
Knowing that this could have been it, that the rope could have been snipped.
And they have no memory of the afterlife.No memory of the afterlife at all.
They have absolutely no understanding that any of this stuff happened to them.
I cant help but bring this all back toThe Last Jedi, obviously.
The answer isnt that you stop trying or you imitate some other persons way of succeeding.
The answer is you just have to figure it out, day by day.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
