Imaginary Worlds - Making The Good Places Better

Episode Date: March 5, 2020

The Good Place just ended after four critically acclaimed seasons, and it was one of several recent TV shows to imagine the afterlife as being far from paradise. Pastor and podcaster JR Forasteros and author Greg Garrett explore why pop culture heavens are being depicted as bureaucracies where the angels are overwhelmed or lost sight of their mission. And Todd May describes what it was like being a philosophy consultant on The Good Place. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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You're listening to Imaginary Worlds, a show about how we create them and why we suspend our disbelief. I'm Eric Molenski. One of the most requested topics that I've gotten is The Good Place, which was a comedy series that just ended after four seasons. Now I love The Good Place, but I wanted to wait to discuss it until it was over, because the writers clearly had an ending in mind, and I wanted to see what it was. And obviously, if I'm talking about the ending, this episode will be full of spoilers.

Now, if you haven't seen The Good Place and don't care about spoilers, the premise is that The Good Place is essentially heaven, but it looks like a quaint suburban town. And it's run by Michael, played by Ted Danson, who is an immortal being slash architect. Do all the neighborhoods look like this? No, every neighborhood is unique. Some have warm weather, some cold, some are cities, some farmland. But in each one, every blade of grass, every ladybug, every detail has been precisely designed and calibrated for its residents. There's a lot of frozen yogurt places. Yeah, that's the one thing we put in all the neighborhoods. People love frozen yogurt. I don't know what to tell you. The main character is Eleanor, played by Kristen Bell. She thinks that she ended up in the good place by accident. In fact, based on the life she led, she thinks she probably should have ended up

in the bad place. And at first, the only person that she confides in is Chidi, played by William Jackson Harper. Back on Earth, he was a philosophy professor. Eleanor, I swear that I will never say or do anything to cause you any harm. Good, because those aren't my memories. I wasn't a lawyer. I never went to the Ukraine. I hate clowns.

There's been a big mistake. I'm not supposed to be here. Wait, what? If you're thinking, how long did they keep that premise going? Actually, the show flips the premise on its head so many times as Eleanor and her friends try to figure out why this afterlife system is so messed up and how to fix it. In fact, I've never seen a show reinvent itself that many times, pushing the boundaries of their world building in the different roles that the characters got to play. But what really fascinated me about The Good Place was how seriously the show took philosophy and the question of how to be a good person. In The Showrunner, Michael Schur consulted with a

lot of philosophers, including Todd May, who was a professor at Clemson University in South Carolina. Todd was actually flown out to Los Angeles to give the writers a crash course on philosophy. So how did Todd end up in Hollywood? Well, the showrunner, Mike Schur, had been reading Todd's book, which is called Death, the Art of Living. He was reading it apparently at night in bed, and the cover of the book is just, it's a gray with a raven, and it just says death on it.

And his wife got into bed, saw the book, and said, our marriage isn't going to survive this show, is it? He apparently continued to plow through the book. The marriage survived and thrived. But he liked the themes in the book, particularly the idea that mortality is something that's essential for our lives to have meaning. In fact, a lot of Todd's ideas influence The Good Place, as the characters kept trying to figure out how to live a good, eternal life. There are debates in philosophy about whether an immortal life would be a life worth living. And I came down very strongly on the side that in order for

our lives to be worth living, they have to be moral. I think that idea attracted him, but also the idea that in making our lives meaningful, morality plays a lot, not just mortality, but morality has a large part to play. So when you finally got to the writer's room, just observing, what was it like to see philosophical principles kind of get churned through a writer's room of comedy writers? Well, the short answer is it was great. I would show up and talk to them about ideas that Mike had already put in front of me. He said, look, we're interested in learning about X, Y, and Z. So I'll give you, Eric, one example. I was distinguishing between shame and guilt. Guilt is something about what you've done. You feel bad about something you've done. Shame is about who you are. This question came up in an episode where Ted Danson's character,

Michael, who is a reformed demon, is regretting his past. And he's actually comforted by one of the humans, Jason, played by Manny Jacinto. I don't like thinking about who I used to be. Listen, Michael, it's okay to feel or plead guilty about bad things you used to do, but you don't have to feel shame about who you were because you're not a demon anymore. You're just like a nice, weird, happy old dude. And so that distinction sort of helped structure that moment in the episode. But I think it also helped a bit to structure what happens afterwards. Because if people feel bad about what they've done, they feel guilty. They try to do better. But if they feel bad about what they've done, they feel guilty, they try to do better. But if they

feel bad about who they are, if they feel ashamed, it's not clear always, depending on how deep the shame is, that they're going to be able to recover. They're going to start thinking of themselves as bad people. And one of the things that The Good Place insists on is that we should think of everybody or nearly everybody as morally redeemable, as people who can do better if given the right circumstances. One of the most interesting characters on the show is not human or angel or demon. It's Janet, played by Darcy Carden. I'm Janet. I'm the informational assistant here in The Good Place. She's like this walking database.

You can ask her about the creation of the universe or history. Oh, there was a guy who lived in Avondale, Arizona around 2002. His name was Kevin Paltonik. Is he gay? No. Really? Huh. I guess he just didn't want to have sex with me.

That's correct. Janet begins as a Siri or Alexa type character, but she also changes and becomes a more self-aware character. And Todd says the most challenging episode that he consulted on was one where the humans got sucked into Janet's inner void, and they all looked like her. So Darcy Carden played all of the characters at the same time. In another show,

that would have been played out as a gag. But the writers were asking Todd serious questions about personal identity. When is it me and when is it no longer me? And the Janet's episode, where Janet does this, or Darcy Carton does this remarkable job of imitating all the others, that's a way of trying to think about personal identity, people's changing, when are they no longer themselves, when are they somebody else? And it's signaled by the blackboard, which actually has the issue of personal identity on it. In fact, the lecture that Todd gave the writers ended up being the lecture that Chidi, the philosophy professor, gives to the other characters while he is being embodied by Janet. Take a seat. Conceptions of the self.

Let's start with John Locke, who believed that personal identity was based on having a continued consciousness, essentially. You know, the more that I talked with Todd, the more that I realized a lot of him ended up in Chidi's character. The writers even consulted with him about which philosopher Chidi would want to meet in the good place. And Todd said, well, Aristotle was in favor of slavery. Plato was very elitist. So he suggested an ancient Greek feminist named Hypatia. So they decided to go with her. When they did, they emailed me about how to pronounce her name. So I emailed some Greek scholars, and one of them said, oh, it's Hypatia. Another one said Hypatia. Another one said Hypatia. And so I emailed him, and I said, I don't really know which of these to choose. I'm not a scholar of Greek. He emailed back, said, well, we're going to use all of them, and then we're going to have her say, just call me Patty. You know what? Just call me Patty.

Okay. Well, Patty, I'm a huge fan. I had a poster of you on my wall in high school. Well, actually, it was just a poster of Trinity from the Matrix. But that's how I imagined you would look because you're so cool. Oh, is she the reason you got beat up so much? She's one of them. But Todd's biggest contribution to the show was one of the major changes that the characters made to the design of The Good Place to get it working properly. The characters invented a kind of death in heaven. So you can live in The Good Place for all of eternity,

but if you choose to leave, there is a door that will make you disappear. And knowing that death is an option makes their immortal lives worth living. And that idea came from Todd's book because he thinks that mortality is crucial to our sense of morality. And he thinks our sense of morality is reflected and reinforced by social interactions. And he worries that in the real world, we are drifting away from having a healthy sense of community because so many of our interactions today are virtual. The folks in the good place are not bound to their iPhones and not bound to their social media. And one of the things that emerges in the good place, and this is a thought that you could trace

all the way back to the philosopher Aristotle, is that in order for people to be good, it requires having other people around them. People become good often with the influence of one another. Where the show departs from Aristotle, and where I think, by the way, the show is right and Aristotle is mistaken, is that for Aristotle, you always have to have models of people who are good, people who are wise, in order for people to have somebody to imitate. Whereas in The Good Place, people who are fundamentally flawed in different ways can make one another good. But they make one another good. But they make one another good in being together, in interacting with one another, in spending time

with one another, in developing emotional connections with one another. And all of those things are done in a face-to-face way. They're not done through social media, and they're not done through their iPhones. That gets reflected in the production design of the show. The decor in The Good Place is somewhere between the 1950s and the 1980s. Even though the show takes place now, and the beings that run the afterlife are all-powerful and immortal, they're using outdated 20th century technology. They may not have iPhones at The Good Place, but there are people who know how to, like, make you relive your life eight or 900 times.

There are people who can appear and disappear and grant your every wish. So it's not as though the good place is somehow situating itself in the 1950s. I think what it is doing is situating people in face-to-face relationships with one another and not having those relationships be mediated in ways that a lot of our contemporary lives are mediated. And I think what it does is allows those relationships to unfold and allows us to see what the unfolding of relationships might offer to us. And The Good Place is not a standalone outlier of a show. There's actually been an

influx of shows about the great beyond, from Good Omens to Forever to Miracle Workers. So how come? Why are all these different shows popping up now? We'll get to that in a moment. Before we continue, I want to give another heads up about spoilers. If I mention a TV show or a movie, I'm going to reveal plot points about it. Greg Garrett teaches at Baylor University in Texas. He also wrote a book called Entertaining Judgment, which is about depictions of the afterlife in pop culture. Writing the book was also a personal project for him. I was raised Southern Baptist.

In at least the churches that I knew growing up, there was this very powerful afterlife orientation. Really, everything in this life was about situating you for the afterlife. And then after about 25 years in the kind of spiritual wilderness, if you will, I became Episcopalian, where there is much more focus on what we're supposed to be doing in this life. And it's really interesting because, you know, I started out as somebody who cared so much about the afterlife, like I couldn't sleep at night. I was like, you know, I'm not sure I want to, you know, die tonight because I might go to hell. And now I'm part of a tradition where it's like, yeah, we don't really think about this so much. Is that also partially what led you to explore these alternate versions? Yeah, it really did.

And I remember my dad early on when I said I was writing a book about the afterlife. And my dad is still Southern Baptist, and he does not curse. But on this occasion, he said, what the hell do you know about the afterlife? And I was like, that's fair. I don't know anything. Nobody knows anything. You know, we have these religious teachings. We have these philosophical ideas.

And then we have these religious teachings, we have these philosophical ideas, and then we have these creative versions. Now, I had already been looking through the history of images of heaven, going back to Renaissance paintings. And I realized that the mansion-sized wrought iron gate on top of a very fluffy white cloud with people in white robes with big feathered white wings. That trope, which we all know from black and white movies, really dates back to the Victorian era. Yeah. Like if you're walking through the streets of London and like you were walking through mud and muck and horse dung, you can't see the sky because of the smog, the yellow fog. That's a great point because if we think of how every age kind of develops these stories of the afterlife, that's certainly a powerful reaction to a really ugly, dank, dim existence. If our images of the afterlife were

influenced by our lives on earth, then it is interesting to note that the most common trope today is the bureaucracy, like in the 1991 film Defending Your Life. Albert Brooks played a character who had just died, and he is evaluated at an office park in the afterlife. Now, Albert Brooks is wearing the classic white robe you would imagine in heaven, but his caseworker is wearing a suit. So, is this what you thought it would be? Thought what would be? Where am I? Is this heaven? No, it isn't heaven. Is it hell? No, it isn't hell either. Actually, there is no hell, Although I hear Los Angeles is getting pretty close.

After that came the HBO adaptation of Angels in America, where the character Pryor, who's dying of AIDS, pleads his case to a committee of angels that look like a New York City co-op board. They're sitting at a wooden table with too many folders to go through. And behind them are endless rows of workers typing at desks. I'm 30 years old, for God's sake. I haven't done anything yet. I want to be healthy again.

And this plague, it should stop in me and everywhere. Make it go away. We have tried. We suffer with you, but we don't know. We do not know how. That was the first time that I had seen a depiction of heaven where the angels were overwhelmed. And the problems of our world were more than they can handle. Which is appropriate, given the subject of our world were more than they can handle, which is appropriate

given the subject matter of angels in America. But at least they're self-aware. A lot of the comedy in The Good Place is that the workers in the afterlife think they're doing a good job when they are really not. So this is the main feed. Every action by every human on Earth is recorded and then sent here to be assigned a point value based on the absolute moral worth of that action. For example, a couple in Osaka, Japan, just decided to have a destination wedding. Negative 1,200 points.

Oh, and it's a destination theme wedding. Negative 4,300. The theme's Lord of the Rings. They're basically doomed. Again 4,300. The theme's Lord of the Rings. They're basically doomed. Again, Greg Garrett. I think one of the things that kind of helps explain the continuing use of heaven as a bureaucracy, besides the simple fact that it helps us to identify with something that is supposed to be beyond our experience, is that it might explain why things are so messed up.

Because if these stories about the afterlife are supposed to be in some sense about, you know, justice, and people getting what they deserve, and people not getting what they deserve, I mean, a lot of times in this life, we're very well aware that people don't get what they deserve, either because they are really good people who don't receive good things in return, or really terrible people who seem to get away with things, you know, unless there's some sort of personal soul cost attached to it. And then there are the really dysfunctional depictions of heaven, like in the show Good Omens, which is a great adaptation of the novel by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman, the angels are so obsessed with fighting hell, which is depicted as basically like an office from hell, that the heavenly bureaucracy is not worried about wiping

out all of humanity if they can destroy hell in the process. An angel, played by Michael Sheen, tries to dissuade his boss, played by Don Draper. I mean, Jon Hamm. Well? I just thought there was something we could do. There is. We can fight. And we can win.

But there doesn't have to be a war. Of course there does. Otherwise, how would we win it? And in the show Miracle Workers, the angels are frustrated because God, played by Steve Buscemi, is not even interested in running his corporation, Heaven Inc. Hi. God. Hi. Hi. Eliza. What's up?

Okay, there is a crazy typhoon happening, and it's killing lots of people. Can you help? I don't want to sound cynical, but what's the point? J.R. Forresteros is a pastor of a church in Texas. He also covers fantasy worlds in his books and podcasts. I asked him, why are we seeing all these very skeptical depictions of heaven right now? I think it speaks to our disillusionment with institutions that we've seen, you know, basically since, you know, Vietnam and Nixon and Watergate and all that kind of stuff. And it certainly has been continuing through all of the, you know, sex scandals in the churches. And we can't imagine a system doing good.

You know, when we think about systems, it seems like they just have to fail us. Yeah, it's so interesting because, I mean, I was a film major in college and we looked at how after World War II there was a big spike in movies about heaven for an obvious reason. But in all of those movies, yeah, the leadership of heaven was totally unquestioned. There was literally the voice of God, you know, kind of running heaven. It was just, you know, part of the story. But then by the time, you know, dogma, right? You have God getting trapped in, accidentally trapped in a body. But once God is freed, everything's fine. And again, it was like the bureaucracy of heaven that was getting in the way there, right? And then I think you get past that to something like The Good Place where it's,

no, it's the people at the top that are the problem. I mean, the closest thing we have to God is probably the judge. And, you know, she's, as long as she has her TV shows and her burrito, she doesn't care about anything else. Let's have a look at your files. Wait, you don't already know everything about us? You're not omniscient? Well, not in the way you mean. I try to learn as little as I can about the events of humankind so I can remain impartial

because I'm a charge, yadda yadda yadda. That being said, sometimes I get bored and I cheat a little bit. I've been binging Ken Burns' Vietnam recently. It's okay. I mean, I'm immortal, but'll cheat a little bit. I've been binging Ken Burns' Vietnam recently. It's okay. I mean, I'm immortal, but that thing is long. You know what I'm saying? JR says, there is another interesting development in the way that heaven is being depicted. We're starting to imagine eternal life as being tedious or worse.

You know, and so they have this idea that like, when we think about heaven, we're imagining a place where any desire that we have, no matter how trivial or how silly can be satisfied. In Defending Your Life, they keep saying, I didn't even count how many times someone said, you can eat whatever you want and you won't get fat. You like a pie? I love pie. I like you.

I'm going to bring you nine pies to take with you a pie for every day and again i think that's interesting because it speaks to our culture which we're we live in the richest nation on earth where the vast majority of the earth's resources are consumed by us so we live in a place that more than any other time in human history, we literally can have whatever we want. I mean, literally, I can click a button and then something appears at my door in like an hour. And then yet in all of these depictions of the afterlife, people get bored with that really quickly. And they realize that maybe having everything I want as soon as I want it isn't all that it's cracked up to be. Or maybe that's not

the sum total of what we exist for. Yeah. I mean, I think one of the tricky things too about depicting the afterlife is that when we do depict the afterlife, once we get there, we're very much ourselves with all of our human desires. So sort of the idea is that you can get everything you want and no consequences. And that's true for everybody simultaneously. And I think that seems to be the part where these circuits start to go haywire. Which, I mean, yeah, because that's a problem in our society, right? We all want different things. Or even when we want the same explicitly stated goal,

we have different ideas about how to accomplish that goal. So if you have some kind of magical shortcut that lets people have whatever they want when they want it, what happens when our desires conflict with each other? So again, I keep going back to The Good Place, but I think that's what's so profound about that show is that it says we can't all have that. And in season four, with the introduction of Brent into the show, the privileged white male, like his desires are explicitly causing everyone else problems. I've been called racist, sexist. I don't have a racist or sexist bone in my body. I am Brent Norwalk and I'm a good person. I'm in the good place. You ever heard of it? And I'm here because I deserve to be here. I'm here because I earned it. Now, in the past, stories about the afterlife

were usually about characters that died but were sent back to Earth to deal with unfinished business. And when they solve their problems with the living, they go to heaven. The end. But in these new stories, the character arcs play out almost entirely within the afterlife. Like in the show Forever, where Fred Armisen and Maya Rudolph play a couple that are basically spirits wandering around Los Angeles. So this is it? Just keep going? And how long does this go on for? I mean, what's the point of all this? Well, what was the point of the thing before this? In Forever, it's these two people who, you know, the wife has come to resent and sort of despise her husband. And when he dies, she actually feels free in a way, even as she's grieving.

feels free in a way, even as she's grieving. And then when she dies and she's reunited with him in this sort of like very bland afterlife, she leaves him the way that she never left him in, in, in life. But at the end of the first season, they, they end up finding their way back to each other because they found this like sort of deeper understanding of what love is that is eternal. And I think that's actually a really beautiful thing in a world where so many of our relationships don't seem to be able to figure out how to go the distance.

Now, here is where Greg Garrett has an issue with The Good Place. Remember, they introduced this idea of a kind of death that you can choose in heaven. And he was disappointed that only one of the human characters chose to stay behind to focus on helping other people. The rest of them chose this kind of death after they had completed their character arcs. I felt that it sort of betrayed the original concept of the show, which is that community is what shapes us. So ultimately, one by one, they reach this moment of epiphany. I've reached the point where I'm as completely happy or enlightened as I can be, and off I go. off I go. And it is in some ways a statement much more in line with American spirituality,

which often is very individual focused. This show bought into the concept, which I think is sort of countercultural to us, but that in Christian theology, we talk about as ecclesia, which is the gathering of people around a central idea or achievement that makes us all better. So we've talked a lot about bureaucracies being a common trope in a lot of these stories, but what about that idea of ecclesia, of community, of people making each other better? Is that unique to The Good Place, or is that something that you see coming up in a lot of these different depictions of the afterlife? I think there is a big part where we're wondering, what are we supposed to be doing? And how do we do it with each other? Because, you know, over the last four years, particularly, we've been in this culture that we don't all even seem to

agree about the important things about what it means to be human. There are always these disagreements on a kind of philosophical level. It's like higher taxes, lower taxes. But these seem to have calcified into these visions of the people who don't vote like us or pray like us or love like us or look like us as dangerous. It's almost like we're having a hard time recovering our common humanity. And J.R. thinks people are feeling a sense of urgency in trying to answer these questions now. More and more, our culture is becoming really pessimistic about what's next for us. I think especially younger generations. I mean, if you're under, what, 20, you've been told your entire life that we're not going to have a planet when you're 50.

So again, I think that it becomes natural to say, well, if we have an expiration date, what happens next? One of the reasons why these shows appeal to me is just watching these characters put behind the things that worried them in life, or even worrying about the earth itself, and having all the time they want to focus on each other. That's why I didn't have an issue with the door of death in The Good Place. It made the time that the characters had together so much sweeter. And it reminded me to be grateful for and appreciate the loving relationships that I have in my life.

In fact, I kept thinking about another sitcom that Ted Danson was in, a show that I loved as a kid, where they reminded us every week that making your way in the world today takes everything you've got. Taking a break from all your worries sure would help a lot. Sometimes you just want to go

where everybody knows your name and they're always glad you came. Sounds like heaven to me. That is it for this week. Thank you for listening. Special thanks to Greg Garrett, Jair Forasteros, and Todd May. By the way, if you watched The Good Place all the way to the end, you saw him on the show. He played a student in Chidi's philosophy class. I was petrified. I'm the kind of person, they put me in front of 200, 300 people,

give me a theme to talk about, and I'll just talk about it. I'm comfortable. But give me two lines that I have to memorize, and I freak out. The Chidi character, Will Harper, was great. He just said, look, Todd, they're going to do 7, 8, 9, 10, 15 takes of this thing, and you're going to screw up something. Don't worry about it. So ultimately, this all goes back to the line from Professor May's book. Mortality offers meaning to our lives, and morality helps navigate that meaning. Wait, what I think it says is that mortality offers meaning to the events of our lives.

I'm pretty sure I'm right since it's like my book. Yes, Professor May, you're probably right about what you wrote. My assistant producer is Stephanie Billman. You can like the show on Facebook. I tweet at emalinski and Imagine World's pod. And if you really like the show, please leave a review wherever you get your podcasts

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