The Meaning of Life According to 'The Good Place'

Michael Schur's masterful afterlife sitcom teaches us how to be better, with big assists from Kant, the Trolley Problem, and Buddhism.

In this series of posts, I’ll be looking at the ultimate messages of some of TV’s most meaningful shows.

The Good Place ends with a bold idea: What if heaven had an exit door, an option for a soul to leave and vanish into eternity whenever it wanted to, whenever it felt complete? After all, if the pearly-gates entrance exists, why not an out-door, too?

The series, a comedy with a fantastical edge and a PhD in philosophy, ran on NBC from 2016 to 2020, and its existence, let alone its success, seems like a modern miracle. It served as creator Michael Schur’s major solo follow-up to the liberal fantasy Parks and Rec, and it boils his almost radically optimistic ideas about community, civics, and ethics down to their essence. His resumé includes several other delightful shows, like Brooklyn Nine-Nine and the recent A Man on the Inside. But The Good Place remains his masterpiece.

The Good Place begins with a woman named Eleanor Shellstrop (Kristen Bell) finding herself checking into the afterlife. When she realizes she’s in “the good place,” she knows there’s been a mistake—she was a careless and shallow person and she’s well aware of it. Guided by afterlife architect Michael (Ted Danson) and his humanoid AI assistant Janet (D’Arcy Carden), she soon finds that the good place is a pleasant neighborhood with a town square, a frozen yogurt shop, and homes where residents live with their pre-ordained “soulmates.” Hers is ethics professor Chidi (William Jackson Harper). She also meets name-dropping socialite Tahani (Jameela Jamil) and her similarly surprising soulmate, a silent Buddhist monk named Jianyu (Manny Jacinto).

Throughout many, many twists, the four main resident characters navigate the afterlife together, finding it to be much more sprawling and complicated than it initially seemed. We see the bad place, the good place, even a hilarious “medium place”; we meet a god-like figure, a judge played by Maya Rudolph. Sometimes the residents work with Michael and Janet, sometimes against them. In the end, their goal ends up being nothing short of rethinking the way that morality is calculated. "What matters isn't if people are good or bad,” Michael says. “What matters is, if they're trying to be better today than they were yesterday."

The brilliance of The Good Place comes, in part, from its seeming simplicity: It is the afterlife as sitcom. A ragtag group of very different kinds of people are stuck in a situation together, and they face a problem every episode that they work their way out of together. It’s just that in this case, those problems might involve being transported to other dimensions and horrific demons, or a contentious town square meeting or bad party. They might also involve the famous Trolley Problem from ethics texts or Kant and Aristotle.

And in the end, they literally tell us their version of the meaning of life: in part, that life takes its meaning from the fact that it ends. To put it a less cheery way: "Birth is a curse and existence is a prison," as Michael says. He’s not wrong. Another way of putting this is Buddhism’s idea that life is suffering, and that if you acknowledge that first, there are ways out of it. Instead of denying the suffering, you look directly at it, feel it, and act when the time is right.

The series also establishes death as something not to fear, another Buddhist tenet. While the characters experience some harrowing moments in the afterlife, they also smooth out the process for the rest of us, which is valuable in a culture terrified of old age and death. In fact, death is even desirable in The Good Place, not only in that it can lead the decent among us to “the good place,” but also in that its finality lends import to our time as humans. As Eleanor realizes, “Every human is a little bit sad all the time because you know you’re going to die. But that knowledge is what gives life meaning.”

Chidi uses Buddhist theory to explain death: “Picture a wave in the ocean. You can see it, measure it—its height, the way the sunlight refracts as it passes through—and it's there, you can see it, and you know what it is, it's a wave. And then it crashes on the shore and it's gone. But the water is still there. The wave was just ... a different way for the water to be for a little while. That's one conception of death for a Buddhist: the wave returns to the ocean, where it came from and where it's meant to be.”

Time magazine said, in a 2020 headline: “The Good Place Became the Last Great Sitcom on Network TV by Daring Its Audience to Be Better.” It’s a bold claim. But the fact remains that The Good Place took a flimsy idea behind the cheesiest of sitcoms—the pretense of a morality lesson—and made it manifest. Will the central characters become better people? In this case, the entire premise depends on it.

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