“Welcome! Everything is fine.”
So reads a large sign that faces Eleanor Shellstrop( Kristen Bell) in the opening scene of the NBC sitcom “The Good Place.” Sitting in a nondescript hall, she’s soon beckoned into an office where a human named Michael( Ted Danson ), apparently in charge of things, tells her that she’s dead. In fact, Eleanor died after being hit by a truck advertising an erectile dysfunction pill and has landed in the afterlife — specifically, in the Good Place, a nondenominational version of what we might bellow “heaven.”
There’s only one problem: Eleanor isn’t the angelic human rights lawyer Michael thinks she is. During her lifetime, she actually peddled swindle medication to senior citizens over the telephone, so, she frets, she probably should have been sent to the Bad Place. Someone royally forked up. Oh, also, she can’t swear: In their neighborhood of the Good Place, the indecencies are converted into inoffensive phonetic siblings — fork, shirt, bench — since apparently the well-behaved residents don’t care for vulgarity.
For the meme-conscious, it should have been clear from that first moment that something would be rotten in the Good Place. “Everything is fine, ” with its anxious and somewhat defensive assurance, almost exactly echoes “This is fine, ” a meme that originated in the webcomic “Gunshow” by K.C. Green in 2013. In the comic, a puppy sits obliviously amid flames as the room he’s in burns down.
“This is fine, ” the dog says. “That’s okay, things are going to be okay.”
Things rapidly devolve from “fine” to “maybe not fine” to “catastrophic” in “The Good Place.”( If you haven’t watched the prove, be aware that this article contains major spoilers .) There, Eleanor fulfills her soulmate, Chidi, who was a professor of ethics and moral philosophy, and their neighbors, insecure socialite Tahani and Buddhist monk Jianyu. She rapidly discovers that Jianyu represents another case of mistaken identity — he’s actually Jason, a low-level criminal and professional amateur DJ from Florida. Eventually, she confides in Chidi, who undertakes to teach the seemingly misplaced Jason and Eleanor ethics so that they will be good enough people to stay. The stress of lying to Michael gnaws at his subconsciou the whole time.
At the end of the first season, though, everything alters. It turns out Michael is a demon, and he’s been torturing the four humans the whole time. The ambitious experiment was his brainchild, in which he hoped to goad Eleanor, Chidi, Tahani and Jason into tormenting each other for what he anticipated would be thousands of years. They were never in the Good Place at all. Cue Eleanor’s show-stopping revelation: “ This is the Bad Place! ”
And lo, a meme was born.
On liberal Twitter, Kristen Bell’s puckish face and raised finger, positioned above the words “This is the Bad Place! ”, serve as a ubiquitous, catchall response to every new horrific bit of news out of the White House today. The phrase is both comically mild and comically extreme: We’re literally in hell, but we’re going to say it with a smile.
It’s fitting that a sitcom would provide the meme for our new era, our reality-show presidency and our dystopian political landscape. At heart, sitcoms are meme delivery vehicles. As an art sort, the sitcom doesn’t distinguish itself through narrative, character developing, suspense or intricacy; it’s repetitive, comforting and populated by archetypes. Where the sitcom excels is in repackaging the familiar, over and over again.
The best sitcoms provide us with a vocabulary for talking about our lives — our quotidian lives, in particular. Shows like “Seinfeld” and “The Office” and “Friends” played out on tiny stages, merely large enough to depict friendship quandaries, workplace hijinks and love triangles. They give us Platonic templates for our messy, particular problem: A workplace crush is so Jim and Pam, an overeager coworker is a Leslie Knope, and Ross and Rachel were on a break ( maybe ). They dedicate us stock phrases, too, like “Did I do that? ” and “That’s what she said” and “Yada yada yada.”
But in a period when permeating, existential political angst has assumed the primary role in our private lives as well as our public ones, “Friends” GIFs simply won’t cut it. For the endless, despair-filled dialogues about our broken presidency and rising white supremacist violence, we need more than the anodyne yuks of a group of cronies who frequent a coffee shop. We need memes about the loss of hope and innocence, and about the quandary of trying to be better people while living in a terrible world we mostly deserve. That’s exactly what “The Good Place” provides — at least for spectators on the liberal side of the spectrum.
Given the gaping chasm between the left and right in 2018, that might be the most any TV reveal can accomplish. In July, Todd VanDerWerff argued that traditional, family-centered, multi-camera sitcoms like “The Carmichael Show” and “Mom” might be the redemption of our political discourse, as they incorporate political jousting into their comedy. “They all look at a profoundly fractured America and find room for humor — modern-day' All in the Family’-style shows that watch every argument between right and left as an opportunity to tweak the foibles of both, ” he wrote. VanderWerff’s statement presumes that political dialogue between left and right hasn’t already broken down. But it has. Sadly, conversation today takes place largely within the left and the right. Those who feel President Donald Trump is an imminent threat to the nation have little to say to those who believe he’s restoring America’s greatness.
For TV watchers in the former group, “The Good Place” has proven to be a startlingly realistic parable for their own perception of America today. Startling, of course, because it’s on the unrealistic side for a sitcom. It’s a genre largely set in cubicle farms, living room, bars and diners. But “The Good Place” is set in the afterlife. The premise made it sound so hokey that I avoided it until midway through the first season. I gagged at their chances of “The Office( Afterlife ). ” Instead, it’s “No Exit( The Sitcom ), ” a suspenseful comedy in which the stakes are enormous( eternal torment ), the spins and turns thrilling, and the result always the same: They’re in the Bad Place.
What better comedy alter-ego for a world in which every new Russia investigation update and presidential tweet occasions immense sturm und drang, but deposits us exactly where we were before, with a racist moron as chairwoman and a sociopathic GOP platform defining the agenda?
For many left-leaning spectators — specifically people who failed to vote or phone-bank for Hillary Clinton, people who didn’t want to ruin Thanksgiving by talking politics with their racist relatives, white people in general — there’s also a sense of sinking culpability mirrored in “The Good Place.” We are the reason we’re here. Eleanor’s primary kind of torture is her acute awareness that she doesn’t deserve eternal bliss. She was a selfish grifter, unpleasant to everyone she encountered, and openly amoral. She’s desperate to stay in the Good Place, and to try, however unevenly, to deserve it, but she knows she was the designer of her own sadnes.
Still, Eleanor has a rebellious sense that she doesn’t quite deserve the Bad Place, either. “I was a medium person, ” she says helplessly. “I should get to expend infinity in a medium place.” The penalty, like the Trump presidency, feels disproportionate to the crime.
“The Good Place” would be notable simply for pulling off such a neat bit of timely commentary, for eerily reflecting the Trump era without immediately engaging with it at all. But it doesn’t just offer commentary; it’s a primer for us to have tough, timely dialogues. Its sitcom framework builds it perfectly suited to building an dialect for us to speak about politics.
Sitcoms thrive on simplicity and repeat, and in certain ways “The Good Place” subverts this expectation, with its “Lost”-inspired setting and suspenseful narrative. But it simultaneously attains the repeat overt — each time Michael’s experiment fails and the humans figure out they’re in the Bad Place, he reboots everything and starts from the beginning( the second period, the sign reads “Welcome! Everything is great! ” ). In one episode, we watch Eleanor, Chidi, Tahani and Jason go through dozens of reboots, each objective the same way: “ This is the Bad Place! ” On a drama, we’d merely get to see that revelation once; on a sitcom, we need to see it over and over again. The repeating ad absurdum transforms the horrifying into the silly, and repackages a dramatic uncover as a catchphrase.
And those catchphrases: They’re nearly parodies of sitcom mottoes. “The Good Place” waters them down to pitch-perfect blandness — “This is the Bad Place”; “what the fork? ”; “everything is fine.” It’s this very blandness that delivers the kick.( “ This is the pit of relentless torment! ” wouldn’t have quite the same resonance .) Even the most colorful swears — “Holy motherforking shirtballs” — come off as daffy , not caustic. The smooth-edged simplicity of much of the show’s vocabulary makes the weirdly specific memes — like Jason’s obsession with Jacksonville Jaguars quarterback Blake Bortles, or the proliferation of frozen yogurt coffeehouses — all the more punchy.
The resulting memes slot seamlessly into our endless public reckoning with what America has done. “The Good Place” scripts out precisely the sort of conversation many on the left are now having daily, if not hourly: A discussion among flawed people who want to get better, and get to the Good Place, but who often differ as to how. No wonder the show’s foursome have become our Trump-era “Sex and the City” archetypes. Ethical purist Chidi, savvy Eleanor, virtue-signaling Tahini, and clueless Jason represent all of the ruling impulses in any #resistance debate.
Without hope of escape, of course, we’d all lose our intellects. The reveal appeared in danger of skidding into a stultifying cycle of reboots, but promptly circumvented that by providing a glimmer of hope. Much of the show’s second season has revolved around an uneasy alliance between Michael, whose employees are on the verge of ratting him out to his boss if his torture experiment is figured out again, and the humans, who don’t want their memories wiped. Michael promises he can get them to the Good Place eventually — a promise that, we learned in a recent episode, was a bald-faced lie. He can’t do it. Each avenue to paradise seems to go up in smoke. He even conjures up a hot air balloon with a moral-goodness-assessing scale that he claims will take the righteous among them to the Good Place, but he rapidly must admit that it’s a hoax.
How fitting for a Trump presidency in which the consequences seem catastrophic, but the quick solutions — impeachment, the 25 th Amendment — slip from our fingers as we grasp at them. Despair seems to stretch in every direction, because the onslaught is advancing from every horizon. The chairperson and his allies have launched oratorical and policy assaults on immigrants, people of color, females, transgender people, the poor, journalists. We can’t talk about it as a war on women’s reproductive rights, or the social safety net — it’s a war on everything progressives hold dear.
We’ve lost specificity and nuance in the maelstrom of Trumpism; what’s left is a sense of good versus evil, and left versus right. We’ve also lost faith in our ability to improve things through usual channels; demanding modesty from the president change anything , nor do falling approval ratings, and scandals that would have demolished previous leaders have constructed seemingly no impact. The moment calls for a similarly Manichean and Sisyphean meme — we can’t speak in any other way. There’s a Good Place and a Bad Place. Turns out, we’re in the Bad Place, and we don’t know how to get out.
The show’s meme of realization, “ This is the Bad Place, ” also connotes the comedy of the recycled epiphanies we have now. “Wow, Trump is a racist! ” we call after read leaked commentaries in which he reportedly referred to majority black countries as “shitholes.” It still feels shocking to many, even though we’ve had that very epiphany before — when he implied that most Mexican immigrants were rapists and felons, when he propelled the racist birther conspiracy theory that held Barack Obama was not born in America, when he was investigated for racial discrimination in his housing developments in the 1970 s.
We had the realization, and we failed to adequately address it, so Trump is still around, more powerful than ever, and still doing racist things. Again and again, we realise we’re in the Bad Place, and again and again, the realization fails to save us. We wake up every morning and we’re still here.
And you know what? There are too many frozen yogurt parlors, on the demonstrate and in the real world. That should have been the first sign that something had gone horribly wrong.
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