Well, fork. NBC’s fantastic, surreal drama The Good Place is coming to an end. Series creator Michael Shur posted a statement on Twitter saying that the upcoming fourth season would be the show’s last.
In the statement, Shur (who also created Brooklyn 99 and Parks and Recreation) says that following the show’s renewal after its first season, he and the show’s writers plotted out where they wanted to take the series. “I began to feel like four seasons — just over 50 episodes — was the right lifespan,” he wrote, and noted that while they’ve thought about pushing it a bit further, they opted to end the series while it was still fresh.
Spoilers ahead for the first three seasons.
The show follows a young woman named Eleanor Shellstrop (played by Kristen Bell), who dies in an accident and wakes up in what she’s told is “the Good Place,” a utopian afterlife for the good people of the world, run by an entity known as Michael (played by Ted Danson). Eleanor realizes that she’s been sent there by mistake, and tells her assigned soulmate, Chidi Anagonye (played by William Jackson Harper), that she’s really a bad person, and the two of them work to try and make her a better person, so she’s not sent to “the Bad Place.”
As it turns out, Eleanor, Chidi, and their friends, Jason Mendoza (Manny Jacinto) and Tahani Al-Jamil (Jameela Jamil), are in the right place after all: their supposed utopia is an experimental Bad Place, designed to drive them insane in more subtle ways, and that Michael is really a demon. They make this realization in the first season, only to have Michael wipe their memories for the second (in which they realize their predicament and escape again), and by the third season, they’ve been given a second chance to try again on Earth. NBC renewed the series for a fourth and now final season last December, which is expected to air later this fall.
The show has received widespread acclaim for its comedic chops and its exploration of ethics and philosophy. As Elizabeth Yuko noted for The Atlantic back in 2017, “the sitcom offers a thoughtful and humorous survey of a wide range of concepts that rarely get explored before a mainstream audience.”
It’s a bummer that we aren’t going to see more of the show after this season, but it’s been a fun, unique, and entertaining ride thus far. If you haven’t seen the show yet, the first two seasons are available on Netflix (at least in the US) and the third should be available sometime later this year.
This article is from The Verge
