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The Good Philosophy An Existential Reading and Analysis of NBC’s The Good Place
By: u/freakingbullshirt
NBC’s The Good Place is a television show about where we go when we die. While Friedrich Nietzsche would probably laugh at the idea and say that heaven is a condition of the heart, not somewhere you go after death, he would also probably say, “What’s a television show?”
By following four characters’ journey through the afterlife, The Good Place becomes an existentialist’s guide to navigating modern society and life in general by showing us how we shouldn’t live our lives. Before we dive into the philosophy of the show, let’s recap what happened in season one.
The Good Place opens on Eleanor Shellstrop (Kristen Bell) waking up and being told by Michael (Ted Danson) that she has died and is now in the “Good Place.” The Good Place is not the Christian heaven or hell, it is instead one of many distinct Good Place neighborhoods where only the best humans live when they die. Michael, the architect of the neighborhood, tells Eleanor that she is in the Good Place because of her exemplary life on Earth. There’s just one problem: Eleanor isn’t supposed to be there. Eleanor was not a human rights lawyer that spent her free time feeding hungry children as Michael said she was. Instead Eleanor worked at a call center in Arizona and scammed old people into buying medication they didn’t need. Season one of The Good Place follows Eleanor as her soulmate Chidi (everyone is assigned a soulmate upon entering the Good Place; Eleanor’s soulmate just happens to be a professor of ethics from Senegal) teaches her how to be a better person so she can learn to live in the Good Place. Chidi secretly teaches the basics of moral philosophy to Eleanor and Jason (an amateur DJ from Jacksonville, Florida who was also mistakenly taken to the Good Place) until they are caught by Tahani, Jason’s soulmate. Everything comes to a head in the final episode of the season when agents from the Bad Place come to collect two people in order to compensate for mistakenly sending Eleanor and Jason to the Good Place. As all of our main characters are fighting about who deserves eternal damnation, Eleanor has an epiphany. She turns to Michael and says, “As we were all fighting and yelling at each other about who deserves to go to the Bad Place, I thought to myself ‘Man, this is torture.’ And then it hit me. They’re never going to call a train to take us to the Bad Place. They can’t, because we’re already here. This is the Bad Place.”
It’s hard to understate the impact of Eleanor’s realization. The entire show is flipped on its head in the last few minutes of the season when Michael reveals that he is, in fact, a demon who designed the “Good Place” just to torture Eleanor, Chidi, Jason, and Tahani. Not only does this turn of events raise thousands of questions about the plot of the show, it also firmly cements The Good Place as a true existential work, but we’ll get to that. Before we can discuss what the philosophy espoused by The Good Place can teach us, we must first establish that it the show operates under existential theory, not utilitarianism or contractualism as some on the internet have theorized. In episode one, during Eleanor’s orientation into the Good Place, Michael shows her a video that explains how people are sorted between the Good Place and the Bad Place. In this video, Michael states that “During your time on Earth, every one of your actions carried with it a positive or a negative value, depending on how much good or bad that action put into the universe. When your time on Earth ends, we calculate the total value of your life… only people with the very highest scores come here, to the Good Place!” With this points system, The Good Place seems to posit a belief in moral objectivism. Furthermore, if every action here on Earth carries with it a positive or negative point value, doesn’t that fly in the face of existence preceding essence? However, the key to understanding The Good Place as an existential work is to realize that this points system is not what actually determines whether a person belongs in the Good Place or the Bad Place.
Chidi dedicated his life to moral philosophy and to living ethically and is shown to have 1,948,668 points. Tahani raised billions of dollars for countless charities and accrued 997,485 points throughout her life. However consider for a moment that we know all of our four characters are all actually in the Bad Place, despite how many points they have. This puts to bed any possibility that the show might operate under contractualism or utilitarianism, as both operate under the assumption that objective moral truth not only exists but that it would be the basis on which you would judge whether someone is good or bad.
So if total points don’t determine whether a person is good or bad- what does? Although The Good Place answers this question differently for each character, it seems that each character is sent to the Bad Place for violating a concept that existentialist philosophers warned us about. Let’s begin with Jason.
Jason Mendoza spent his life as an amateur DJ in Jacksonville, Florida. Making ends meet by selling fake drugs to college kids, Jason died by suffocation when he hid inside a safe during a botched robbery of a Mexican restaurant. While he might not have spent his life helping orphans or working for the greater good, why does he deserve to be in the bad place? Jason’s only goal in life was to become a successful DJ. In his own words, “I don’t want to be a DJ in Jacksonville forever. I want to DJ in Daytona, Tallahassee, Tampa even. I want it all.” When he was finally given the opportunity to take over for the popular DJ AcidCat, the crowd ended up booing him off stage. Jean-Paul Sartre would agree that Jason belongs in the Bad Place because Jason lived as a Being-for-Others. Sartre cautioned that in many relationships, people can fall in love not with each other, but with the feeling they get when the other person looks at them. In doing so, the lovers become trapped as the for-itself is replaced with the other person’s thoughts and actions. Neither person’s purpose is to exist as an individual. Jason’s obsession with becoming a DJ is no different. His for-itself had been replaced by the success of his career. His career abruptly ended when he was booed off stage at the AcidCat show. Instead of moving on with his life, Jason was left with no sense of self and spiraled out of control, he ended up torching AcidCat’s speedboat and eventually died while trying to rob a Mexican restaurant a day later. If The Good Place’s moral philosophy is determined by existential theory as I have stated, Sartre says Jason belongs in the Bad Place. Sartre also says that Tahani belongs “down there” too.
Tahani Al-Jamil is a was raised in English high society. She studied at Oxford and attended the Sorbonne in France. Although she lived a very rewarding and successful life, Tahani constantly lived in the shadow of her older sister Kamilah. Kamilah was a Nobel prize winner and a Grammy-winning artist. Tahani’s biggest accomplishment in life was raising 60 billion dollars for charities and nonprofits, but it still wasn’t enough to make her parents proud. Unlike Jason, Tahani spent her life doing good for other people, so why does she belong in the Bad Place? Tahani lived her life in bad-faith. In many ways, Tahani is not unlike Sartre’s waiter. Sartre cautioned us not to become like this waiter- a man who moved too quickly and was too eager to please customers. The waiter was so committed to his job that he forgot that he was a person with free will first and a waiter second. By committing his life to his job, he was living a lie. Similarly, Tahani was living a lie by dedicating her life to helping others just to impress her parents. Tahani never developed any beliefs or morals of her own. She never worked for anything other than fame or recognition. She forgot that she was a free person who could have left her parents and sister behind and lived her own life. Additionally, Tahani committed another mortal sin according to Sartre. Tahani constantly dwells on the past by bringing up all the good deeds she performed on Earth. In one conversation while picking up trash Tahani says, “You know, this really reminds me of my time in Vietnam, picking up mortar shells with my godmother, Diana. Doesn’t really matter what she’s a princess of. It’s not really important.” Tahani’s casual name-dropping doesn’t stop there, as she routinely says things like, “I haven’t been this upset since my good friend Taylor was rudely upstaged by my other friend Kanye, who was defending my best friend, Beyoncé.” Tahani, more than any other character, is obsessed with past achievements which Sartre warned would lead to replacing the current self with a past self, thus living a life in bad-faith.
At first glance, it might seem that the existentialists wouldn’t have a problem with Eleanor. She lived a classically immoral life, scamming old people for a living, going to a coffee shop where the owner harasses people, and insisting on using the “10 items or less line” when checking out with a full cart at the grocery store. But even though most of her actions on Earth made everyone else around her worse off, Eleanor lived authentically and for herself. She wasn’t governed by an external moral code or by a strict dedication to a specific role. So does she belong in the real Good Place? Simone de Beauvoir says no. Eleanor is sent to the Bad Place because she is a textbook narcissist. Narcissism, as defined by de Beauvoir, is a “well-defined process of alienation: the self is posited as an absolute end and the subject escapes itself in it.” Whereas Tahani and Jason lived in bad-faith because they never developed belief systems of their own or stepped out of their roles in society to understand their freedom, it seems Eleanor swung too far the other way. As de Beauvoir would say “She is busy, but does not do anything [...] not being able to accomplish herself in any projects and aims.” Here de Beauvoir is speaking about housewives, but this applies to Eleanor too. Eleanor is completely absorbed in herself to the point of never dedicating her life to anything but her own pleasure. She quits an amazing job making lots of money just because she was expected to be friendly with her coworkers. Eleanor is so crippled by her wretched parents and terrible childhood that she never forms any type of identity or personal philosophy outside of herself. Instead of doing things because she thought she was right or basing decisions on a personal moral code, all of Eleanor's actions on Earth were her trying to prove others wrong. She didn't refuse to stop going to the coffee shop owned by a man who was filmed groping a woman during a job interview on principle, she kept going to Andy's Coffee because her boyfriend told her she shouldn't.
Finally, we have Chidi Anagonye. On Earth Chidi was a professor of ethics and moral philosophy, so one would think that he would be looked upon with the most grace by our existential philosophers. However, according to existential theory, Chidi is the most screwed out of the four main characters. Chidi is sent to the bad place because he is essentially just existential anxiety personified. Soren Kierkegaard defined anxiety as unfocused fear and likened it to the feeling a man gets when standing on the edge of a cliff. Looking down into the abyss below, the man is very scared of falling but he also feels an illogical urge to throw himself off the cliff. This is what Kierkegaard called the “dizziness of freedom.” This anxiety is described by Kierkegaard and many other existentialists as essential to recognizing one’s freedom of choice. However, Chidi should have heeded Kierkegaard’s advice when he said, "become honest with yourself so that you do not deceive yourself with imagined power, with which you experience imagined victory in imagined struggle." His entire life Chidi was paralyzed by the fear of making wrong choices. In primary school, Chidi kept everyone from playing soccer at recess because while picking teams he weighed the pros and cons of picking every kid in class for so long that recess ended before they could start a game. Later in life, he continued to make people miserable with his indecisiveness. Chidi ruined his relationship with his girlfriend when he was consumed by the guilt of lying to a coworker about liking a pair of boots. He once claimed that he missed his mother’s back surgery because “I promised my landlord's nephew that I would help him program his phone on the day of her surgery!” Eventually, his inability to make even the simplest of choices led to his death. Chidi died standing on the sidewalk when an air conditioning unit fell on him. He had been standing under it for 30 minutes just trying to pick a restaurant to go to. Chidi lived his entire life studying moral philosophy and yet never developed his own personal identity. Kierkegaard acknowledges that it is easy to get bogged down in the moral, ethical or practical implications of any choice. Specifically, he uses the example of getting married. According to Kierkegaard you can either get married or you can choose not to get married, but both choices will lead to your unhappiness in some way or another. If you choose to get married you may fall out of love with your partner or the passion may die. But if you choose not to get married, you’ll be haunted by the fact that you never married the person you love. Because all choices will lead to our eventual unhappiness, the only correct choice is the one made in good faith. When we consider our own values and make a choice based on those values, we free ourselves from anxiety because we know the choices we made were our own. Chidi’s mortal sin was never identifying his own beliefs and making a choice for himself.
The Good Place has offered us four distinct examples of how we shouldn’t live our lives, but unlike our four main characters, we’re not dead yet. So what does it say about how we should live? As I see it, using an existential point of view, The Good Place urges us to examine our pasts with a keen eye. If our main characters had taken the existential philosophers’ advice and questioned their preconceived notions about why things matter to them, they might have ended up in the actual Good Place. Just as we can learn from the writings of Sartre, de Beauvoir and Kierkegaard, we can learn from The Good Place too. We should learn from Jason to not let external forces dictate the choices we make. From Tahani, we should learn to challenge the roles we have accepted for ourselves and not let our past accomplishments become our identity. Eleanor teaches us to live for ourselves, but to not let our obsession with simple pleasures get in the way of actual self improvement. Lastly, Chidi teaches us to embrace the uncertainty of life. After all, we only get a short amount of time on Earth. We can either spend that time worrying about how to live it best, or we can just live.
TL;DR I wrote my final paper for my philosophy 101 class about The Good Place & u/Jeremymia gave me a reason to post it here. Let me know what you think or what philosophy you think the universe of TGP follows!