Michael Schur: We tried avoiding "Trump bullsh*t" in The Good Place writers' room

TheWrap

All Trump talk was banned in The Good Place writers' room, except for "appointed times." In fact, The Good Place creator has tried to keep the NBC comedy separate from the Trump era. “This show was conceived of and written before any of this nonsense happened, so it’s not a reaction to this, it’s a contiguous or concurrent event,” said Schur at the TV press tour. He called the endless political anxiety "a virus — or maybe a fungus — that crawls over and seeps into and infects everything that it gets near," adding: “I was like ‘We can’t function as a show if all we’re doing is talking about this.’ So we have like appointed times where we discuss current events and what’s going on — and then we work. And we’ve tried to keep the ethics that our characters are discussing and the ethics of modern-day America (separate).” In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Schur pointed out that The Good Place began in a pre-November 2016 world. "Our season one finale, which had the big reveal that they were in the Bad Place, aired the night before the inauguration," he said. "It seemed like the whole thing was real-time running commentary. But I don't think anything changed internally. This is always what we wanted to do and say. Then the world changed, and it maybe gives the show a different feeling as you watch it. I certainly didn't expect, when we started making a show about moral philosophy, that the idea of ethical behavior would be so prominent in the national discussion."

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• Breaking Bad's 62-episode run made Michael Schur realize he wanted The Good Place to have a short run, too
• Schur recalls pitching The Good Place as an investigation in what it meant to be a good person, which turned out to be very complicated