The Good Place. It’s good. It’s funny (case in point: Kristen Bell yelling ‘ya basic!’). It’s thought provoking (case in point: William Jackson Harper quoting Nietzsche is the biggest source of inspiration for my coursework). It has some much-needed representation—including a south Asian main character, which I don’t think we see enough of on TV. But I would like to postulate another nuance: is The Good Place a metaphor for the prison system?
Season four poses a question as to what the purpose of the afterlife is. A karmic retribution for damned souls beyond repair? Or a facilitator for self-improvement, if human beings are capable of such a thing. Punishment or rehabilitation. This is the nexus of season four of The Good Place, but also the debate surrounding the prison system today.
This premise is backed up by some so-good-you’ll-kick-yourself foreshadowing. In season one, Eleanor is subtly tortured by her inability to live up to her false reputation as a saintly death row lawyer. Yet by the franchise’s midpoint, she is on track to save humanity from being eternally tortured, pleading her case to Maya Rudolph’s Judge Gen. That is the very definition of a death row lawyer, people.
‘The Good Place’’s redemptive attitude towards supposedly bad people is interesting when considered in the light of Mike Schur’s canon, especially Brooklyn 99. The show’s over-simplistic and over-sympathetic depiction of a police precinct garnered it the label ‘copaganda’ in 2020, and it resonates. The police force demonstrate a detached and cold-hearted attitude towards those they arrest (although the sarcastic ‘cool motive, still murder’ was a good one and very much deserved). Jake Peralta’s penchant for action movies leads him to call them ‘bad guys’, and the rest of the squad inexplicably follow suit. There are jokes about police brutality and even one episode justifying unlawful arrest. The demonisation of defense attorneys (barristers, if you’re a brit) as universally reviled should definitely have set off some alarm bells. I do believe the show improved on this in the more recent seasons, and the events of the Moo Moo episode definitely needed to be portrayed, but the point still stands.
Where Brooklyn 99 demonstrates callousness towards these ‘bad guys’, The Good Place teaches us that they have redeeming features- we grow to love the self-proclaimed dirtbags that are selfish Eleanor and archetypal ‘Florida Man’ Jason. But we also learn that those we consider ‘good’ or ‘important’ can be bad guys too. Take Tahani. Lauded on earth and in much of season one for her good-doing as a philanthropist (bolstered, of course, by her pre-existing wealth), it is revealed that her virtue is all for selfish reasons. No, she is not a criminal, but only because that wouldn’t fit the storyline of the show. Tahani is motivated by self interest in her pursuit of social capital and approval. She represents the tax evaders, the embezzlers, the intimidators, anyone whose rise to the top is supported by corrupt behaviour, and she absolutely belongs in the prison hellscape with the rest of ‘team cockroach’.
Chidi is slightly harder to justify. It still rubs me the wrong way that Chidi’s fatal, damnable flaw is essentially having anxiety so acute that it makes his friends and family hate him because people with anxiety do not need any more reason to believe that everyone around them hates them. Chidi is a bit of an anomaly because his function in the story is to be the gang’s moral compass, meaning that whatever his hamartia is must not make him any less ethically credible. Still, maybe they should have stuck with the almond milk skulduggery that still plays on Chidi’s heartstrings. Perhaps Chidi is representative of the way those suffering from mental illnesses are unjustly treated when they’re sent to prison for the purpose of punishment, especially if you scale up Chidi’s suffering to a condition more represented among prison inmates like addiction or depression.
And Michael. Michael represents the need to reform the system. He goes through a rehabilitative process at the same time as the rest of the gang, representing and then creating change towards a system which in turn, rehabilitates its inmates. The authorities that take it upon themselves to punish wrongdoers are perhaps those who need the most transformation themselves.
