There Is No God on TV, Only 'The Good Place'
God has a bad habit of getting cancelled. He (or she) is too specific. Or perhaps not specific enough. Either way, God is the Katherine Heigl of moral-driven television: a once popular omnipresent being who just can’t seem to get a show to stick these days. In the '90s, the balancing act was a bit easier-shows like Promised Land and Touched By an Angel had a solid place in the cultural zeitgeist. In a span of 22 to 42 minutes, God had the ability to fascinate the masses with plots that featured an enchanted homeless person or Della Reese. But audiences that once gravitated to the miraculous manifestations of Christian-centric television just aren't showing up anymore. And Christian-focused morality shows have dropped in popularity since the mid-2000s
What has emerged is The Good Place, a show that only feels familiar because of what you bring to it. Yes, your Good Place may be Christian Heaven, but The Good Place isn't Christian. Or Jewish or Hindu or Muslim. Actually, it's specifically none of them, as The Good Place creator Michael Schur clarifies. "There’s a line in the pilot where Kristen Bell’s character asks, 'Well, who got it right?' and [Ted Danson] says every religion got it about 5 percent right," Schur says. "It was a way of saying, if you’re looking for an examination of God, look somewhere else.” After two successful seasons, no one seems to have a problem with that.
If anything, The Good Place taps into something bigger: if viewers can't agree on which god is good, maybe we should just start with what is good.
The early 2000s started a new kind of conversation with Lost, which follows the survivors of Oceanic Airlines Flight 815 and the supernatural elements they endure to survive on a deserted island. Lost called upon philosophical concepts, retribution, and the dynamic between science and faith. But most important of all, it asked that its audience be a bit more open-minded than it had been before, and it paid off. People didn't just respond to this idea of a non-religious ambiguous force-they embraced it.
The Damon Lindelof and J.J. Abrams brainchild opened a door the door for something unfamiliar to the television landscape. What if television, a medium whose reach has expanded astronomically with streaming and Internet services, tapped into as many audiences as possible?
"I think we have pretty much covered the white Christian worldview in the last 75 years of television-we’re good," Schur jokes. "If that’s the worldview you want to engage in, you can watch TV every day of your life until you die." That belief, paired with the inspiration from shows like Lost and The Leftovers-another Lindelof special-inspired The Good Place. When asked if it was crazy to consider Lost an inspiration for The Good Place, Schur said, "You’re not crazy. Damon Lindelof was the first person I pitched the show to."
With the influence of Lindelof in mind, Schur quickly backtracked on any religion-focused ideas and decided on a show that would deal with how to simply be a good person. No capital-G god or anything-just a lesson in not being bad. "I basically asked my agent to put me in touch with Damon because I’m a fan first and foremost," said Schur. "I asked if we could get breakfast, but like a working breakfast, and I pitched him the idea and said, 'Just tell me if this is viable.'"
Lindelof's breakfast advice contained a slew of pitfalls to avoid: iconography and little things that might alienate a viewer. But Lindelof's greatest directive was to have a plan for what the story would be. After an underdog first season, the series continued to gain traction, thanks in part to NBC putting the entire series online, as well as its quick Netflix turnaround. But past the mechanics of marketing and accessibility, The Good Place approached the topic of morality from a student's perspective instead of an authoritarian one: the focus on ethics continued to expand, reinventing itself and exposing the flaws in The Good Place's own system of judgment. That makes sense-particularly in a world where so many systems of moral judgment overlap and contradict each other simultaneously.
Arguably the most successful religious show from the '90s is 7th Heaven. Though Heaven serves as more of a punchline in 2018 than a proof point, it managed to communicate morality through weekly public service announcements draped in the guise of a television episode. And yet, it rarely mentioned anything related directly to God or the Bible. In many ways, it worked opposite of how The Good Place does, wrapping morality in the false pretense of Christianity. As Broadly Diana Tourjée writes, "This type of religious media, which aims to advocate for the beliefs of Christianity without arguing for them explicitly, is considered 'pre-evangelism,' as opposed to heavy-handed, full-on proselytizing."
The Good Place takes the same approach, but from the secular side of things. Schur insists, "We specifically avoided iconography as much as we could-there’s no halos or harps or pearly gates. Though subtle, you’re still suggesting that Christian Heaven is the good one."
That approach is what television producers seem to be missing. Viewers aren't interested in God as much as they are in the moral findings that can often be found adjacent to religion. The religion or God-heavy series put out by networks in recent years have been lucky to last one TV season. "People are finding when they branch out that there’s an excitement and waiting," Schur explains. "The country is still white and Christian despite the racist protestations of certain members of the right wing in this country, but not to the extent it used to be, and no longer is that the case in what is represented in your options for entertainment."
The move out of the Christian light has been tough for a lot of network comedies, unsure of how to proceed in a less faith-based world. Last television season, Kevin (Probably) Saves the World and Living Biblically (a CBS sitcom based off a book from Esquire editor-at-large, A.J. Jacobs) were cancelled after one-season runs. ABC's Kevin attempted a secular concept, but it was still tied to this idea that God was appointing Kevin to some kind of Noah-esque conquest to save the world. Biblically focused on living strictly by the rules of the Bible-a body of work that has always been polarizing. The concepts, no matter how ambitious, continued to alienate audiences.
The newest addition to the canon, God Friended Me, premiered on CBS All Access last month before it makes its official premiere this week. The social-media driven faith-dramedy focuses on an atheist being tested by "God" on Facebook. But it fails in the same way so many others before it has: It's a recycled concept (Joan of Arcadia) that rams its nose so hard against the window that it makes a Lost nosebleed look like a finger prick. It's the classic cool guy conundrum of trying too hard, and Friended is practically begging for your acceptance.
What separates The Good Place from the rest is that it has largely ignored presenting any kind of moral agenda or takeaways for its viewers because it's too busy trying to corral its own jaded misfits. "The show has suggested a number of times that the systems we use to judge them that exist are a little unfair," Schur explains. "It doesn’t always take the entirety of the human experience into consideration when crunching those numbers."
The move is a smart one and possibly one that has helped keep the network sitcom alive in a landscape that loves to nix freshmen series. The series releases episodes to international markets via Netflix a few hours after the American broadcast. With international audiences factoring into these industry decisions, making a move based only on American audiences is shortsighted. "The world is a lot more accessible," Schur says. "As a result, there’s not only one worldview that matters anymore to the people making content, and that’s a good thing."
So perhaps the argument is that television audiences never grew tired of any particular god as much as they grew tired of having a singular force pressed upon them. Between the saccharine wisdoms of 7th Heaven and the dark consequences of Lost and The Leftovers, Schur's creation in The Good Place leverages a little bit of both worlds. Schur's motive is simple. He says, "My hope is that it’s less alienating to say, 'This is what a bunch of really brilliant minds have thought about right and wrong behavior over the lost 2500 years, and you can see if any of these strike your fancy.'"
And in an era where finding some morality doesn't seem like such a bad idea, it's good to have a place to turn to, even if the source material is a little nonspecific.
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