The Good Place series finale "delivered on the feels"

The Washington Post

"The task of writing a suitable farewell for NBC’s one-of-a-kind comedy The Good Place is like being handed a blank blue book for the final essay exam in a freshman philosophy course," says Hank Stuever. "What did we learn about the meaning of life? (And what didn’t we learn?) What can we say about human nature and the choices we make? And do those choices affect everything else? Is the universe keeping score? You have one hour and 45 minutes. Cite examples." Thursday's series finale, says Stuever, "lacked the knifey wit and rapid-fire momentum that defined The Good Place, but it delivered on the feels. These tender tendencies are not to be underestimated in today’s comedies. It’s why people can’t stop watching Jim and Pam fall in love on reruns of The Office, where Good Place creator Michael Schur, a sort of high-functioning iconoclast in the network TV world, once worked as a writer, before co-creating Parks and Recreation and Brooklyn Nine-Nine. These shows (and their tonal cousins, such as Superstore and Schitt’s Creek) act as fuzzy blankets for an audience that prizes warmth and reassurance as much as the biting wit. It’s a carefully calibrated, salty-sweet balance between the snarky and the emotional. It’s the digs, followed by the hugs." Even though The Good Place's first episodes felt a tad too twee, it "was a small miracle in the noisy, doomed atmosphere of our particular End Times," says Stuever. "It was a gentle way to ponder our reason for being here...Beyond its final attempt to pluck its viewers’ easily-plucked heartstrings, I hope The Good Place’s legacy is one of inquiry, rumination and, most of all, a healthy dose of doubt. Dunked as we are in candy-coated artifice and carefully crafted lies, our world needs more Eleanors, willing to stand up and say that we’re all being duped."

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• Michael Schur stuck the landing with a 90-minute delight of a finale: "I expected to cry all through this finale as soon as I saw its title was, 'Whenever You’re Ready,'" says Dennis Perkins. "I sensed, rightly as it turns out, that this would be an extra-long series of goodbyes to and from some of the most endearing, heroic, hilarious, and beautifully realized characters I’d ever seen on TV, and, well, I’m a crier. But Michael Schur and his architects have always, it turns out, understood exactly what they were doing here in this dippy, deep, soulful, and eternally surprising series."
• The Good Place left behind no unfinished business: "The risk of a show like The Good Place, with all its twists and turns, can be that the proceedings lose their stakes," says Laura Bradley. "In this show’s case, however, that was never a problem; the stakes in this world feel both epic and nonexistent anyway. The lack of tension in this series is, in many ways, part of the appeal—so in the end, of course there would be no casualties of time. In The Good Place, there are no missed connections, and there are no loose ends. Although death remains predictable in this world, it’s merely a step to the other side—where everyone still has the time to put their affairs in absolute order, if they are willing to work for that time."
• Like the Parks and Recreation finale, The Good Place's ending was more like an epilogue:  "Because The Good Place has always been about the entire moral and metaphysical human experience, following Eleanor and some of the others to the end of that experience — and seeing Michael at the start of his own version of it —  feels like the true ending of things, even after the Good and Bad Places got fixed by Team Cockroach," says Alan Sepinwall.
• The Good Place finale refused to take the easy way out
• Michael Schur was more successful sticking the landing with The Good Place than he was with Parks and Rec
• Schur finds it ironic that The Good Place is his most streaming-friendly series yet: "The ironic thing is that The Good Place was designed as a way to do an old timey, heavily serialized cliffhanger show that drove live viewership," he says, adding: "I tried to do one thing and ended up doing the opposite. It appears to be a sort of fool's errand to try to predict how any of this stuff is going to affect people and how it will change how they watch."
• Schur talks philosophers, from the one The Good Place writers spent the most time discussing to the most impenetrable
• The cast sat with Seth Meyers for a live show just one night after watching the series finale for the first time
• Ted Danson expects The Good Place to have a long afterlife: "I really feel genuinely that I was a part of something very special," he says. "It’s a very special show and it’s not going to go away because another group of 12-year-olds will come up and want to see it and their parents will want them to see it. It’s a lovely thing, a lovely messaged, a little gift.”
• Kristen Bell on the concept that hit her the hardest in the series finale: "The fact that once you have everything you’re striving so hard to earn, it’s still not enough," she says. "That what you need to earn is the acceptance of the complex internal decision to let go. It was so beautiful how they made everybody mush in the Good Place because it’s true."
• Michael Schur would rather not explain the series finale: "The show has always taken these big swings in finales, and unlike other shows I've worked on, I just like ending the season and putting out whatever the big idea was … and letting it be for a little while," Schur told The Hollywood Reporter on Thursday morning, hours before the finale aired (NBC did not send the finale to critics and reporters in advance). "I would rather it go out in the world and rattle around a little bit before I jump in and start yelling and screaming about why we did what we did."