Winnipeg Free Press

Winnipeg Free Press (Newspaper) - February 2, 2020, Winnipeg, Manitoba C M Y K PAGE A11 SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 2, 2020 ● WINNIPEGFREEPRESS.COM A 11ENTERTAINMENT I TELEVISION He’s in a Good Place after all S EVERAL years ago, Michael Schur went to a Starbucks and pondered the human condi- tion. He had purchased a cheap coffee and waited until the barista turned toward him to toss his change into the tip jar, realizing immediately how silly it was that he wanted rec- ognition for such a small act. Stuck in traffic later on, he mulled over his “corrupt and bad” motivations — only to have his thoughts interrupted by another driver pulling into the breakdown lane to speed past every- one else. “Well, if someone is keeping track,” Schur, in an interview with The Washington Post, recalls thinking, “that guy just lost 25 points.” Hold on. If someone was keeping track of it all — not in the manner an organized religion would, but in a “purely mathematical, moneyball way” — would he, Mike Schur, have gained or lost points earlier for doing a good thing for a bad reason? How many points would he gain for a purely good deed? Thus, The Good Place was born. (Spoiler alert: story touches on some details of The Good Place finale.) The NBC series, the showrunner’s first solo outing for the network but his fourth sitcom overall, aired its finale Thursday, capping a four-season exploration of what it means to be a good person. It’s the rare show in this doom-and-gloom era to consistently find humour in its rendering of the afterlife. Viewers laugh at Eleanor Shellstrop, Kristen Bell’s character who realizes a points-based system has “mistakenly” landed her in a heaven- like utopia. They might also share her desire to make up for countless moral imperfections by learning to be a more ethical person. “When I threw that 27 cents into the Starbucks jar, my reaction was purely and simply to laugh at myself,” Schur says, “It was like, ‘You idiot. What are you doing, you goofball? I can’t believe how dumb it is that you care that the barista sees you tip 27 cents.’ “ “I think people don’t like being lec- tured to — I don’t like being lectured to, frankly. If moral philosophy wasn’t just going to be a tertiary part of the show but instead was going to be baked into the very centre of it, then comedy was a much better delivery mecha- nism.” As Parks and Recreation neared its end, NBC asked Schur if he’d consider writing a family sitcom next. Schur, who created Parks and Rec with Greg Daniels, his boss on The Office, had become one of the network’s most pro- lific creatives by working within what he calls “very low-fi” settings: a paper company, a local government office, a police department (in Brooklyn Nine- Nine, which he also co-created). After considering the pitch, Schur realized he had nothing new to say: “I’m a white, middle-class kid from Connecticut, and I have a white, upper-class family in Los Angeles,” he explains. “The Caucasian American family is the most well-covered subject in the history of television, by far.” The Good Place ditches the fam- ily unit in favour of focusing on the motivations of individual people: Why does Eleanor have such a hard time being sincere? Why doesn’t ethics professor Chidi Anagonye (William Jackson Harper) ever know what he wants? What is socialite Tahani Al- Jamil (Jameela Jamil) hiding behind her glamorous exterior? And why does Jason Mendoza (Manny Jacinto), an amateur DJ, say the things he does? Combine those dead folks with Michael (Ted Danson), a Bad Place demon who fools the others into thinking they’re in the Good Place — the first season finale’s big reveal — and Janet (D’Arcy Carden), basically a walking database, and you’ve got a diverse set of perso- nas to play with. The show marked Schur’s first time working with such an abstract prem- ise, so he looked to another writer for guidance: Damon Lindelof, the man behind Lost and The Leftovers, a pair of TV dramas dealing heavily with death and the afterlife, as well as the critically acclaimed Watchmen series. Lindelof’s advice was invaluable: You have to know where you’re going with a premise like this, or you’ll start to run in place, and the audience will sense it. The Good Place writers’ room planned a full year ahead; each time they began working on a season, they already knew how it would end. The Good Place is heavy on plot, whether regarding the intricacies of the points system or emotion- ally fraught storylines like Eleanor continuing to spearhead the group’s plan to save humanity after it requires them to clear the memories of Chidi, her love interest. But underlying it all is the basic question of how to judge certain patterns of behaviour. The en- suing conversation is remarkably void of religion, with perhaps the exception of Jason masquerading as a silent Bud- dhist monk early on. The philosophical approach was Schur’s intention from the start. “Every world religion is trying to make sense of a world where humans are just milling around, bumping into each other and doing different things,” he says. “I’m more interested in the milling around, not the overall concept of how a human-made system would judge those actions in relation to what happens to you after you die... We’re only here for a short amount of time, and we only have a certain number of actions we partake in. I’m trying to get to the bottom of what makes those actions good or bad.” Everyone wants to know what it’s like to work with Ted Danson, and Sch- ur has the answer: “Ted is a monster. He’s a terrible person. He’s rude and callous. He’s not thoughtful or kind. I’d say he’s a cruel, cruel person, sadistic, unfeeling, not talented, not funny, not a good actor. Just one of the biggest mistakes of my professional life was casting Ted Danson.” He’s kidding, of course. Plus, once you cast Danson and Bell in a series, Schur adds, the network lets you cast pretty much anyone else you want. He went with four actors whose profiles have risen a great deal since they first wandered into the Good Place: Jacinto, whom Schur describes as “the most likable human being I’ve ever met”; Jamil, who had never acted before but delivers performances Schur likens to “sitting down at a concert piano onstage at the Lincoln Center and play- ing an entire sonata from beginning to end”; Carden, whom he credits with shaping Janet’s transformation from a one-dimensional to a full-bodied char- acter; and Harper, who might have had “the hardest job of anybody.” SONIA RAO Writer reflects on end of four-season run COLLEEN HAYES / NBC The Good Place showrunner Mike Schur (right) speaks to actor Ted Danson while filming an episode of the NBC series’ third season. D’Arcy Carden, Kristen Bell, William Jackson Harper, Ted Danson, Manny Jacinto and Jameela Jamil, in the final season of The Good Place. ● CONTINUED ON A12 A_11_Feb-02-20_FP_01.indd A11 2020-02-01 9:06 PM ;