Take That / The Good Place

A comedy show about what happens when you die makes some jokes involving authoritatively judging things to be good and bad, it probably goes without saying.

Spoilers unmarked

Season 1

• Some of the factors against getting to the Good Place are clearly personal bugaboos of Schur's, like assuming people care what you have to say about David Bowie or rooting for the Yankees.
• All of the Portland Trailblazers are in the Bad Place.
• Michael, when feeling bad, takes a jab at Friends's hated eighth season, calling it "out of ideas" and pointing out how forced and unnatural the romance between Rachel and Joey is.
  • Knowing the true nature of the Good Place, Michael is revealed to be subtly doing this to the show itself.
• When Michael finds out the truth about Eleanor and later "Jianyu" (Jason) he tests them to determine if they're fundamentally good or bad. Two of the things that determine if someone is bad are: participating in or having any emotional investment in The Bachelor and/or its spinoffs, and paying money to listen to Red Hot Chili Peppers.
• Trevor and the Bad Place crew dump a massive amount of Hawaiian pizza in Michael's office. Michael then declares it "the worst pizza".
• Trevor says that he "swears to Bieber" that the Bad Place used the exact same clown painting in Eleanor's house to torture "Real" Eleanor.
• Shawn instantly decides Jason belongs in the Bad Place upon seeing that he's from Florida.
• A running gag through the show, starting in this season, is how everyone hates moral philosophers. Poor Chidi... That one is more of an Affectionate Parody than the others, though - Chidi's encyclopedic knowledge of moral philosophy is shown to be highly valuable, it just also makes him really annoying.
• One of the tortures in the Bad Place is said to be sitting through "college improv".
• After discovering that Shawn wraps himself in a coccoon if you speak to him in an emotional tone, Tahani tells everyone to be as emotionless as "Kristen Stewart on the red carpet".

Season 2

• When Michael in his second Fake Good Place iteration "informs" Chidi about the rarity of the double soulmate incident, he compares it to a double rainbow, or someone in the Internet saying "you know what, you've convinced me I was wrong".
• Among the new methods Michael found to torture people, he has added that all coffee in the fake Good Place would come from single-serve coffee containers.
• The name of Jason's redneck school is Lynyrd Skynyrd High School.
• Being French is apparently a bad modifier, with stealing a baguette (worth -20 points according to the moral scoring system) being worse than stealing bread (worth -17 points) because it makes you more French.
• Apparently, roasts were literally invented in the Bad Place, and Michael's utterly terrible roast lampoons the entire concept.
  Michael: Now that's funny, because it's very cruel and humiliating! (demons laugh)
• In The Bad Place, there's a constant screening of Pirates of the Caribbean, which is now in "The Haunted Crow's Nest or Something. Who Gives a Crap." and is "Now screening everywhere. FOREVER."
• "Rhonda, Diana, Jake and Trent" has Tahani mentioning a conversation she had with Johnny Depp, including that she got good at lying by hanging out with him and saying that "his whole thing isn't exhausting".
• In the Museum of Human Misery, Jason excitedly wants to know if there's a gift shop. Michael exhaustedly explains that they're in Hell. Of course there's a gift shop.
• There's literally a special place in hell for Toxic Masculinity.
• The Bad Place has a lot of AXE body spray. They all loved the new essence; Transformers, which makes them smell like how the movies are — loud and confusing.
• A party in The Bad Place has only three songs: Puddle of Mudd's "She Hates Me", Elmo and Patsy's "Grandma Got Run Over By a Reindeer" and a mash up of the two.
• A white dude growing dreadlocks and being the first to call Ultimate Frisbee "Ultimate" are part of the exhibits in the Museum of Low-Grade Crappiness.
• Among the many departments of the Bad Place, in-between stuff like flesh-eating lightning and bees with teeth are "children's dance recitals" and "holiday weekend IKEA".
• Shawn tries to punish and torture Michael by locking him up in a room with nothing but a pile of New Yorker magazines. He'll never read them, but they just keep coming...
• The restaurants in "The Good Place" all have food that seems like something you'd like, but actually makes you miserable. In the first iteration, the restaurants are frozen yogurt joints. In the second iteration, they all sell Hawaiian pizza, sparking the "does pineapple belong on pizza" debate.

Season 3

• Brexit, the success of The Greatest Showman, the Jacksonville Jaguars' (then-)recent success, and Byron Allen's purchase of The Weather Channel are all weird side effects caused by people from the afterlife interfering with things happening on Earth.
• While looking for evidence of Michael and the group's whereabouts, Shawn asks for some music to pass the time, "something deeply horrible to inspire us". Richard Marx's "Right Here Waiting" plays, which pleases Shawn.
• The Cowboy Skyscraper Grill restaurant, a hilariously over the top theme diner that embodies every bad American stereotype. It counts as both a satire of how other countries see the U.S. and of gimmicky restaurants like Outback Steakhouse that give a reductive view of international cuisine.
• Michael and Janet are able to secure a largely abandoned floor in the university for monitoring the group. Why is it abandoned? It's the journalism department.
  Michael: Bad for the Earth, but good for us.
• In "The Ballad of Donkey Doug" Tahani name-drops Elon Musk again but adds that he's a "weird creep" and wonders why she was friends with him.
• Eleanor suspects her mother will disappear like Keyzer Soze... after his actor Kevin Spacey had his career destroyed by a multitude of sexual abuse accusations.
• A Lord of the Rings themed destination wedding apparently is damning. Note that the destination wedding was negative a thousand points, the fact it had a theme brings it down to three thousand. The minute Neil notices the theme is Lord of the Rings, he declares the couple doomed.
• After arriving in the real Good Place, Chidi suggests that they honestly present themselves as asylum seekers. Jason agrees, and wonders aloud how forked up a place would have to be to turn away refugees. This episode aired right in the middle of the Trump administration demonizing refugees.
• The Good Place people commenting 'we're the good guys, we can't just do things' is stated in the podcast to be a shot at those who think being morally right is better than doing what's right.
• Part of William Shakespeare's eternal punishment is to listen to a recap of the Entourage movie.
• Shawn cites the existence of slavery and Limp Bizkit as proof that humankind is inherently bad.
• The Judge declares that the souls for the new "Good Place" experiment cannot be any more immoral than Team Cockroach, and explicitly rules out serial killers, dictators, and boy-band managers. Later on, Eleanor asks if the first souls coming in for the experiment is a murderer, war criminal, or an Instagram DJ.
• The line "There's this chicken sandwich that, if you eat it, it means you hate gay people. And it's delicious!" is a clear jab at Chick Fil-A, a fast food restaurant run by a staunch Christian family who espouses anti-gay-marriage views.
• After seeing that Chidi and Simone like each other, Janet runs simulations to see what their potential kids might be like. One of them is hot enough to appear on The Bachelor and smart enough to never do so.
• The sheer fact that Gen, the highest authority in the universe and the closest thing the show has to The Big Guy Upstairs, takes the form of a mixed race African American/Jewish woman. And when she visits Earth to experience humanity, she does not have a good time. To contrast, Shawn (head of the Bad Place) chose the form of a middle aged white man purely because of the privilege it gives him ("I can only fail up").

The Selection

• Shawn explains to the demons that they have to pick humans who were the same level of awful as Team Cockroach, making a point that they can't choose dictators, serial killers or white musicians who ever did a "semi-ironic cover of a rap song."
• Bambadjan recommends the person who invented the phrase "think outside the box." While Shawn likes it, they can't use it because the first person to say it was Ugandan President Idi Amin.
• Shawn regularly tortures Emily Dickinson by making her listen to Joe Rogan's podcast.
• Sharing racist memes on Facebook is considered "standard".
• Troy Hastings having a TikTok account is considered a negative quality.
• Shawn says "I swear to Bieber."
• Shawn has Julia Child locked inside a Papa John's kitchen as torture.
• Val recommends having Johnny Depp as a pick for Tahani. Shawn agrees, but they can't use him because he's still alive. "He uses giraffe blood transfusions to prop up his diseased organs."

Season 4

• The official song of the Bad Place is the Kars-4-Kids commercial jingle.
• Brent, one of the new test subjects for the experiment, is full of these.
  • He first comes in complaining about PC culture not letting him tell the jokes he wants and insisting he isn't racist because he has a black dentist. It's a clear caricature of certain comedians who have been complaining about political correctness in the past few years, and Eleanor and Michael find these statements incredibly annoying.
  • Eleanor describes Brent as the kind of guy that thinks the world revolves around him... and admits that it kind of does.
  • Brent loudly and repeatedly mentions that he went to Princeton, as though that fact alone proves his moral worth. Princeton is one of the most prestigious schools in the Ivy League, but it is also top three (in media portrayals, anyway) for smug alumni boasting about their alma mater.
  • Brent's name, "HR complaints", drinking issues, and Ivy League cred also imply that he's a parody of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. Mike Schur would later confirm this on the podcast.
• The step of a demon's life cycle right before a full grown demon is social media CEO.
• Bad Janet lists off several reasons why humans are bad. Along with warmongering and killing each other, she also lists rich mothers who don't vaccinate their children and designers at Apple who keep changing the shape of the chargers. She also disparagingly remarks about how Baby Boomers are egotistical and entitled.
• When it seems Michael is pulling up random good people outside the experiment, Shawn asks to be allowed the same with bad people. His first choices: Elizabeth Holmes, Henry Kissinger, and PewDiePie.
• The entire series is a rebuttal to Jean-Paul Sartre, but "Help is Other People" directly references his play, "No Exit". Sartre famously tried and failed to answer the question "Should I kill myself or have a cup of coffee?", with his mood permanently soured by the Nazis, he came to a fairly dark conclusion about humanity. The play gave us the famous line "Hell is other people". The entire show instead intends to demonstrate that Rousseau Was Right, and people will always help one another when it matters.
• Upon discovering that the real Good Place consists of doing everything you've ever dreamed for a few hours and then being stuck bored out of your skull by the meaninglessness of everything, Tahani laments that it's a "Cosmic Coachella."
• The real Good Place also has a man who talks about how he died from getting a cut on his hand (he lived millennia ago, and one infected cut was all it took), and how jealous he is of modern people who have vaccines. He doesn't understand why anyone wouldn't want one.
• In the Bad Place, Michael talks that there is a special part of hell for Performative Wokeness.
• Chidi has been reading the The Da Vinci Code, stating that after millennia of reading great written works, he's going to try reading "garbage books."
• Janet's last piece of advice to Michael before he goes to live on Earth is to not pay for rental car insurance, as it's a scam.