The Good Place is critically acclaimed not only for its humor and fascination with ethics, but as a Genre Deconstruction of the Sitcom, Deconstructed Character Archetypes based off of recurring sitcom character archetypes and the idea of Character Alignment itself.
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- Aesop Amnesia: After the four humans discover that they were in the Bad Place the entire time, Michael has their memories erased and removes all of the Character Development they accumulated throughout the first season. No matter what Michael does, they all continue to grow and change and become better before they figure out that they are in the Bad Place. Chidi lampshades this in "Dance Dance Resolution", making a point that them suffering hardships and learning to be better afterwards but unable to benefit from the experience is a type of Hell in and of itself. The repetitive nature of their work had caused Michael's entire crew to leave the experiment, forcing him to forgo the mind-wiping strategy and join the humans out of self-preservation. When their memories are erased in the Season 2 finale, he and Janet's memories remain and they are able to manipulate their friends behind the scenes to their benefit. This is also weaponized in the Season 3 finale, when Chidi volunteers to have his mind erased to better their chances of the Medium Place Experiment's success .
- Always Chaotic Evil: Employees of the Bad Place predisposition towards being bad causes them to not only be intentionally obstructive to humans and each other, but they have been taking advantage of back-channels and flaws in the system to their benefit at the expense of mankind, Shawn having known about the massive flaw in the system and did nothing to fix it because it gives the Bad Place more humans to torment. However, their existence is a necessary evil for the moral balance of the universe, their adherence to the Celestial Bureaucracy meaning they are supposed to be Lawful Evil but the flaw in the system (plus Shawn just being a Bad Boss in general) led to their purpose being perverted into needless cruelty. Before Michael found out about the flaw in the points system, Shawn was the only person to notice this and chose not to tell anyone. When Glenn discovered that Shawn was more interested in cheating the system rather than fulfilling the Bad Place's true purpose, he tries to warn the Soul Squad of Shawn's mole. This combined with Michael's Heel–Face Turn in only a matter of months makes their inherent evil more of a question of Nature Versus Nurture.
- Beta Couple: At first, it appears that Jianyu and Tahani are the Beta Couple who exist to make Eleanor feel inadequate, as the former is a Buddhist monk and the latter is a wealthy socialite. However, Tahani finds herself frustrated by her inability to communicate with her soulmate, and it turns out that Jianyu is actually a Florida Man who was mistaken for a monk.
- Be Yourself: Both Eleanor and Jason hate pretending to be other people - more specifically, people who are way better than they ever were on Earth. However, as they slowly realize, they shouldn't aspire to be the people they were on Earth since they might have enjoyed themselves more, but they were also just terrible people who made the lives of everyone around them miserable. Eleanor is the first one to decide to try and change for the better with Chidi's help, first just to save her own ass from ending up in the Bad Place but later out of a genuine desire to atone and become a better person. Jason, meanwhile, isn't interested in improving himself at all until Eleanor verbally castigates him and he's forced to realize the hilariously massive stakes he's dealing with and his need to atone for having been an awful human being. In summary, one shouldn't "be themselves" if when they're themselves, they're not making anyone else's lives better and they're making themselves miserable.
- Fire and Brimstone Hell: The Bad Place's torments are hilariously sadistic, childishly petty, and cheerfully Cross the Line Twice at every available opportunity. However, the cruel creativity seen behind these many punishments (i.e., people being attacked by "bees with teeth" and "butthole spiders") is because the denizens of the Bad Place have been torturing humanity for all of eternity and have just gotten so damn bored of the whole song-and-dance by now. After all, it's not like the Bad Place employees are really seen doing almost anything else aside from tormenting humanity - They're as sick and tired of the constant grind of endless torture as their own prisoners are. What's the whole point in torturing someone if it just goes on and on forever and neither side really gets that much entertainment out of it? Sure, Evil Feels Good for demons in this universe, but even they have their limits. Michael's Fake Good Place Neighborhood project was started with the goal of having the prisoners torment each other and was given such leeway and support because everyone (Michael especially) was getting so tired of the same old thing that they're chomping at the bit for any possibility for trying something new. Even Shawn eventually admits to Michael that his personal vendetta against Team Cockroach is the best source of drama and humor that he's had in effectively millennia. It's in the final season, when the Bad Place is effectively turned from a generic "eternal hell" into a Karmic Reform Hell (where instead of endlessly torturing humans, they selectively torment humans in psychological gambits until they go through enough Jerkass/Heel Realizations to figure out their flaws, move past them, and become truly deserving of the Good Place), that the Bad Place Employees seem to finally reach a state where they're genuinely happy and are glad to be doing something that's actually productive and not just pointless. Eternal punishment needs to have a purpose for it to be worth anything — Otherwise, it's worse than useless.
- The Ditherer: One of Chidi's defining character traits is his indecisiveness. His complete inability to make any decision not only gave him non-stop anxiety his entire life, but it also sent him to the Bad Place because no matter how good his intentions were, he was sent to the setting's equivalent of Hell because it made the people around him miserable. Further more deconstructed as we later learn Chidi suffered from directional insanity and was still sent to Hell, meaning the afterlife didn't take account of any mental health issues while judging humans.
- Easy Road to Hell: The show exposits that the moral point system is incredibly exact, with every single action a person takes no matter how small (like eating a sandwich or buying a trashy magazine) matters in the fate of one's eternal soul. You make enough points, you go to the Good Place and enjoy paradise. You don't make enough points, you go to the Bad Place to be tortured for eternity. At first it is believed that Eleanor, Chidi, Jason and Tahani went to the Bad Place because they were too flawed and were deserving of Hell. In Season Three however, it is revealed that no one has gotten into the Good Place in 521 years; the system itself operates on strict Black-and-White Morality standards applied to an Earth with Grey-and-Gray Morality, turning the idea of living ethically in the modern age into nothing but a glorified Morton's Fork. Whereas most works handwave the implications of the Easy Road to Hell with a typical "Humans Are Bastards" Aesop, The Good Place makes it clear that mankind is not to blame, but instead the very system that has been enabling this to begin with.
- The show also tackles the tendency of writers to use Hell as a form of Take That!! There's a Running Gag of what are pretty obviously petty annoyances or personal bugbears of the series' writers being all-but automatic tickets to the Bad Place (i.e., being a fan of the Red Hot Chili Peppers or being French), which might seem to be just amusingly petty/childish jabs in the moment. But as the series goes on, it turns out to actually be Foreshadowing of the points system for the afterlife being horribly screwed up and completely incompatible with modern-day life. In reality, consigning someone to go to Hell for all eternity just because they enjoy a band that you don't like or for their nationality isn't just immature and cruel, but downright sadistic and insane, showcasing how the protagonists need to get the afterlife's management team (i.e., Gen and the Accounting Department) to properly understand the consequences of their actions in order to save both themselves and the entirety of the human race.
- Fluffy Cloud Heaven: Throughout the series, the Good Place has been described in vague terms, the neighborhood Michael designed to torture Team Cockroach based around what he had only heard what the Good Place was like and having the threat of being kicked-out and sent to Hell being their incentive to stay, the torture coming from that looming threat and simply being around each other. When the gang finally get there in "Patty", it is everything they ever thought it would be... and it sucks. Or rather, it was designed to be the ultimate Utopia where everything they could ever need or want is given to them. Forever. Give the humans there enough time and they'll run out of things to do and the overwhelming positive feelings they are constantly bombarded with loses its novelty. The Good Place Committee had it just as bad, struggling to come up with new ways to keep their residents happy and content. By the time Team Cockroach enters the Good Place, Hypatia of Alexandria is an easily distracted mess and everyone else are all lumbering zombies deprived of any passion or meaning because they had already experienced every good thing the Good Place had to offer with nothing but time to kill, and the Good Place Committee leaves Michael to figure it out himself. To coin a metaphor, the Good Place's inhabitants are basically all the Player Characters in a video game with infinite lives and all the cheats enabled - Sure, it's incredibly easy... but where's the challenge that makes continuing on worthwhile?
- Foil: Michael chose the original four for his Good Place experiment specifically so that they would torture each other with their conflicting personalities, he and the rest of the Bad Place employees meant to subtly push them together to make them miserable as glorified props. Tahani would make Eleanor miserable for being more successful, Eleanor would make Chidi miserable by making him contradict his own ethics trying to keep Eleanor from being discovered and be forced to teach her philosophy, Chidi would make Eleanor miserable by making her contradict her own base instincts to do bad things, Chidi would make Tahani miserable because they seem to be compatible to each other yet he would prefer to be with Eleanor (or "Real Eleanor"), Jason simply being Jianyu made him miserable (something exacerbated by Tahani wanting him to talk to her) and Jason making Eleanor and Chidi miserable for fear of his idiocy blowing their cover. What Michael did not count on was for their personalities complementing one another, as not only do they become friends in-spite of (or, to be honest, in part because of) their conflicting personalities, but they complete and benefit each other as well, Eleanor becoming a better person and outing herself and derailing his plan. When they repeat the experiment in the Medium Place, the Bad Place sends humans who where specifically chosen to conflict with the original four's personalities.
- Goodness Exam: In the episode "The Burrito", the gang manage to escape the Bad Place and makes it to the Judge's chambers and asks for a chance to earn their way into the Good Place post-mortum by showing how they've progressed during their time in the fake Good Place, each of them given a test tailor-made to pick at their worst habits to prove that they've outgrown them. Because Gen is a
True Neutral being with a limited understanding of humanity and its hardships, blissfully unaware that the point system itself is centuries out of date, her tests are too flawed to actually work.- Tahani has to walk down a hall without opening any of the doors, all of the rooms being people talking about her. While the test is as straight-forward as it seems, Tahani fails by going into the room with her parents (who were the reasons she became a shallow socialite so desperate for other people's validation) where she has a heart-to-heart with them. While she manages to get a productive examination from the experience and it was the right thing to do for her, Gen fails her for it anyway because she wasn't supposed to open any of the doors.
- Chidi has to choose between one of two hats (a brown and a grey hat). Because Chidi is The Ditherer who can't decide on the most basic things under the assumption that there is a moral weight to them, he wastes an hour and a half over it. While Gen points out the obvious that there is no "right" answer to picking one and that he's crazy for thinking otherwise, in Season 3 it's revealed that all decisions humans make, no matter how inconsequential, dock people points because of the unintended consequences inherent to a world as interconnected as 21st-century Earth is. So while Chidi is morally right to stress over every little decision according to the flawed system he is judged under, he still fails the test because the Judge is too ignorant of the problem to realize it.
- Jason is left in a room with a game of Madden and he has to play against his favorite team the Jacksonville Jaguars. He immediately begins playing without even letting her finish and she leaves him to it. At the end, it's revealed that his test was a Secret Test of Character to test his impulse control and he failed for not considering the idea that he didn't have to play the game at all. On closer examination, even if Jason waited for Gen to explain the rules, she still set up the test that's basically "play the game against the Jags" and him playing the game at all is treated like a morally wrong act, making it come across as more Schmuck Bait than a true test of his moral worth.
- Instead of being taken to a different room, Eleanor is told by Gen that she and Chidi both already passed and Tahani and Jason's tests are just their way of devising future tortures for them in the Bad Place. Having grown attached to her friends, Eleanor spends a while conflicted on whether or not to take the easy out or stay behind with her friends. By the end, she figures out that Eleanor was being put through a Secret Test of Character to test her selfishness and that the Chidi she was with was just a construct Gen made to test her. While she was the only one who passed Gen's test, she's still set to go to the Bad Place because she wanted to be tested as a group, something Gen calls out as being a bad idea. Ironically, she passes her test by being selfless, yet she's still set to be sent to the Bad Place because she made the selfless decision to stand with her doomed friends through thick and thin.
- Gosh Darn It to Heck!: Most Sitcoms are made to be family-friendly and accessible to general audiences, so cursing is usually made nice, clean and PG-13. Here, it is made into an In-Universe mechanic as using real curse words is made physically impossible in the Neighborhood to make it as wholesome as possible. With the reveal that the Neighborhood is actually in the Bad Place, this makes it is a subtle means of torture by way of not allowing Team Cockroach to use them for catharsis. When the gang makes it to the actual Good Place in Season 3, being able to finally curse is used as a sign that this Good Place is the real deal.
- Humanity Ensues: At the start of the series, Janet is less a person and more of an abstract character archetype of The Pollyanna, being incapable of expressing any emotion other than optimism and store-clerk politeness. After being rebooted over 800 times, she becomes more and more sophisticated and begins to behave more and more like a real person. This has many drawbacks, as this gives her many emotions that she literally was not designed to feel (genuine love, anger, depression, heartbreak, etc.) which causes massive problems with her capacity to serve her purpose and run the neighborhood (that being said, it eventually ends up being a Reconstruction, as her sophistication and understanding of emotions help make it possible for the team to succeed).
- Lawful Evil: The Employees of the Bad Place are demons who's existence in the Celestial Bureaucracy is to represent evil in the moral balance of the universe, their job specifically to punish humans who failed to gain enough points for the Good Place. However, their natural state is being evil, so of course they will be generally unpleasant to themselves and each other as well as the humans they are torturing. The setting's equivalent of Satan Shawn adheres to his Character Alignment by doing nothing to identify the flaw in the system just so that the Bad Place has more humans to torture, making a mockery of the Bad Place's purpose. However, when word gets out of the truth, Glenn defects and tries to help Michael and the humans because he actually believes in the Balance of Good and Evil, seeing Shawn trying to cheat as an affront to this. According to Michael, maintaining this balance is a commonly held belief in the Bad Place, so if knowledge of the system's flaws becomes common, there would be unrest among them.
- Lawful Good: Employees of the Good Place represent the "good" side of the Celestial Bureaucracy, meaning while they are all nice, thoughtful and fun-loving, it also makes them Super Gullible. Team Cockroach manages to run circles around Gwendolyn, and Michael was able to steal Janet from the Good Janet warehouse because they did not think anyone would try stealing one. Not only that, but they are also the most dedicated in following the rules of the Celestial Bureaucracy than anyone else regardless of whether it is ethically right, thus Team Cockroach has to lie to them as a matter of necessity and the Good Place Committee's desire to remain as impartial as possible in dealing with the flaw in the system will result in thousands of innocent people to be sent to the Bad Place in the meantime.
- Lawful Neutral: Neutral beings like Gen (The Judge) and Neil (The Head Accountant) allowed a massive flaw in the afterlife's system to go unnoticed for over 500 years out ignorance in their dedication to remain "impartial" in a universal moral system they hold absolute faith in. Not only that, but being neutral means that they are not meant to deliberately help or hinder anybody, Gen willfully holding back her omniscience under the assumption that it makes her fair and Neil allowing Matt's deteriorating mental state go unnoticed.
- Status Quo Is God: In most sitcoms, the basic establishment of a premise and its characters tend to stay the same episode-to-episode to make it more accessible to newer viewers and make it easier to prolong the show's run. Michael created his neighborhood experiment under the assumption that humans are Static Characters, so he is thrown for a loop when Character Development happens and Eleanor defies all of her instincts and outs herself, leading to them discovering the truth of their Ironic Hell. Michael erases their memories back to square one, but no matter how many times he does this, they always learn and change and figure him out. As a result of all this, the show simply does not have a status quo. Even in Season 1, after the Episode 7 twist, things started changing rapidly, and by the finale of the show it has gone from being about one woman trying to become good enough to earn her accidental place in heaven, to being about that one woman and her friends' new role in fixing the entire structure of the afterlife which allows human souls to earn a place in heaven rather and also to end their existence once they no longer feel it has anything to offer.
- True Neutral: As the setting's equivalent of the Top God, Gen has to stay neutral to keep balance to the world, while the Accountants' sole purpose is to judge every aspect of a human's action and impartially assign points to them, enabling the souls to either go to the Good or Bad Places. Problem is, the Accountants failed to notice the evolving world after globalization begun in earnest due to being ignorant of human situations, which made them assign negative points to almost every possible innocuous action, leading to humanity effectively locked out from the Good Place for 521 years, despite how good or bad they were personally. When Gen found out of the problem, she at first blamed humanity for not investigating the impact of their actions, and when the initial test failed, she decided to 'reboot' the universe, effectively dooming humanity to extinction. It took Gen personally living as a human for 30 years to get that maybe Michael and the humans had a very good point regarding humanity, the point system and the afterlife, at which she uses the experience she gained as a human to reform the afterlife and open the Good Place for humans after countless Jeremy Bearimys.
- Utopia: At the beginning of the show, the neighborhood is populated with what are essentially the cream of the crop of what humanity has to offer, all of them impossibly nice and having a lifetime's worth of good deeds to share with their fellow neighbors. The show would further establish that they are also perfect for each other, the neighborhood painstakingly created down to its minute detail to house these virtuous souls. Eleanor, in contrast, is deeply flawed individual with a lifetime's worth of selfish deeds. Not only does being around people who are objectively better than her cause her to lash out at them, but her badness is a "hammer, just smashing and smashing" the "perfect watch" that is the neighborhood, causing mass panic and havoc. Tahani, who is supposedly one of said virtuous souls, comes across as condescending and attention grabbing, but Eleanor gets to know the real her beneath the "perfect" facade and learns to be her friend. By the end of the season, it is revealed that all of the other humans are demons pretending to be perfect humans as a means of torturing the humans there.
- This is exemplified even further when the main cast arrive at the actual Good Place for good. Unlike the Bad Place, the Good Place itself is very pleasant, with endless opportunities and endless time to pursue them all - except for the fact that humans can have so many wishes to fulfill in the Good Place. Once a Good Place resident is done exploring what they want to see, they still have eternity to spend in the Good Place, which slowly but surely stifles their minds because they have everything they can get and all demands fulfilled on a whim, with even pleasant feelings and positiveness can last so long. This has led to a unique damnation for the Good Place residents, who have all lost their identities, memories, and even drive, said by both Good Place and Bad Place people as no different than what happened in the Bad Place. The only way the Good Place residents can break this funk and become active again is when they are presented an opportunity to leave - even Utopia also gets boring after a while.
