The Good Place goes back to basics for its fourth and final season after Season 3 rough patch

The Ringer

"The sitcom is, by nature, an intimate medium," says Alyssa Rosenberg. "Its most common subjects are insular worlds like the workplace, the platonic friend group, and the nuclear family. Its bite-sized episodes and extended seasons encourage making meals out of picayune problems, which basically sums up Seinfeld’s entire M.O. It’s an objectively awkward fit, on its face, for a story about human nature, redemption, and the moral architecture of the cosmos. But don’t tell The Good Place that. From its earliest entries, The Good Place has mined this juxtaposition of big and small for laughs...But the mismatch between stakes and style also partially explains the rough patch the show went through in its third outing. In retrospect, the season was a transition between two phases of creator Mike Schur’s master plan: the first chronicling four mismatched souls sentenced to a version of hell that looks just like heaven; the second tracking that same group as they’ve evolved from solving their own predicament to making sure no one else ever has to endure it. In practice, The Good Place started to err too far on the side of its fantastical concept and away from the comforting amusements that once helped the philosophy lessons go down. As the characters ping-ponged from Earth to the Bad Place to the celestial Accounting Department, the show lost some of the soothing consistency that gives network sitcoms their enduring appeal. The good news is that The Good Place has always had an endgame." With its fourth and final season, she adds, the show "will end when it has reached the natural conclusion of the path it was on all along."

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• In Season 4, The Good Place returns to its strengths, bringing the story full circle
• Season 4 holds plenty of fun callbacks for devoted fans of the series
• Michael Schur says series finale expectations are too high these days: “We can’t save everything for the last episode"
• The Good Place writers describe completing the final season
• How the cast and crew learned moral philosophy working on The Good Place
• How does Kristen Bell feel knowing The Good Place is almost over?: "I suppose exactly the way it would feel at the end of your life," she says. "I just didn’t quite get enough. I want a little more. I know it has to end, but I didn’t quite get enough and I want a little more."