Warning: spoilers.
For Halloween this year, I went as Bad Janet. I know, I nailed it.
But the best part of this costume wasn’t wearing all black and looking sexy, it was getting to share my enthusiasm for The Good Place with dozens of strangers over the course of two nights last week. Because yes, the show is hilarious, and yes the show is well-written, and yes the characters (and their outfits) are fantastic, and the acting is amazing (and Kirsten Bell and Ted Danson should totally win Emmys for it), and it’s weird and wonderful and many other things.
But The Good Place is more than good TV about morality and ethics, it’s an experiment itself.
An experiment on us, the viewers. By watching the show, we learn about moral philosophy, we see ourselves in the human characters, learn (or re-learn) the same lessons that the humans are learning, and we become better people for it. And while this seems obvious now, it took me until the fourth season to realize this – and to realize it’s changing my life.
In “A Girl From Arizona, Part 2,” Bad Janet suggests, in disguise as Good Janet, that Eleanor should no longer be in charge of the experiment. Eleanor walks in on the group discussing this, and reacts to this suggested change in leadership by reminding them, “I didn’t ask for this!” (that is, to save all of humanity, because she had to step up when Michael backed out last minute). So she quits, and walks out.
Michael follows her outside, saying, “You don’t just to quit this, Eleanor.” To which, she protests that she is not capable of handling this kind of task, that it’s above her paygrade, that she’s trying to do it all with a smile to keep everyone’s spirits up, and she’s not meant for it.
“I’m not the freakin’ savoir of the universe. I’m just a girl from Arizona. That’s it,” Eleanor rages at Michael. “I did a bad job of being in charge of my own life and now I’m supposed to be in charge of everyone else’s life? I cannot do this.” At this point, something inside of me, emotionally, starts to feel squeezed.
Michael sits down next to Eleanor, and counters that he thought his initial experiment to torture them all in his new neighborhood model would be a breeze. But they beat him in 3 months, and then beat him 800 more times. He says it’s because human beings are weird, and he will never truly understand what it is to be one. When it comes to saving humanity? “This is a job for a human,” he says. And I start to feel tears pulling at the corners of my eyes.
“You think you can’t do this? Eleanor, you’re the only one who can do this. Like it or not, the only one who can save humanity is a girl from Arizona,” Michael says to Eleanor.
And Eleanor says my exact next thought: “But everything I do blows up in my face.”
So Michael says, “You know how this works. You fail and then you try something else. And you fail again and again, and you fail a thousand times. And you keep trying, because, maybe the thousand and first idea might work.”
At this point, I’m open crying. Just tears, streaming down my face, while that poignant music plays and Michael walks out of the scene. I realize that the last time I cried before that had been at least three months ago, alone and emotionally overwhelmed in a foreign country. The time before that was another several months prior, sobbing on the kitchen floor due to heartbreak. But this time it was different; this cry was one of relief.
Those tears were me realizing I am both Eleanor and Michael in that scene, both the person who has completely given up in the face of something too big to bear, and the person who has faith that they should keep trying, despite setbacks, despite failures and mistakes, because the next thing – and the next and the next – might be the one that works. And those tears were me admitting that these days, my Eleanor is louder than my Michael. That I want to give up more than to keep trying, because it’s just too much. And I’m starting to tune out, or to not believe, the other Michaels in my life around me, who still have faith.
But the way that Ted Danson looked at Kirsten Bell and said, “this is a job for a human,” stuck with me the rest of the week. I heard, “You think you can’t do this? Eleanor, you’re the only one who can do this. Like it or not, the only one who can save humanity is a girl from Arizona,” echo around in my brain for the next several weeks. But this girl from Iowa didn’t know what to do with it. Not yet.
Enter last week’s episode, “A Chip Driver Mystery.” Of course, I dressed up as Bad Janet for Halloween, the same day the show ran a whole episode focused on Bad Janet.
Perfect costume and perfect timing, I know.
At the start of the episode, Michael tells Bad Janet he’s going to let her go after six months in captivity, but first tells her a final story. Bad Janet obviously has no patience for this, and halfway through the story, she protests: “Every story ends the same way. Just tell me how they screw up and put me out of my misery.”
Michael quickly retorts, “You’re judging them too quickly.” Yet Bad Janet says she knows every single thing humans have ever done – and it’s mostly bad stuff. So, “where does this come from? This insane hope that people are worth the trouble.” Michael adamantly replies that they’re good sometimes, and you should give them the benefit of the doubt.
Michael continues the story with a scene where he suggests to Brent that failure and mistakes are not weakness, because “it’s the next shot that counts.” (Brent had the golfing assistance filter on, and hit a bad shot after turning it off, and got upset.) While Brent is not a character I usually identify with, I too, have gotten angry or resentful or scared when I’m not able to accomplish something. Or I feel threatened by my lack of skill in something because I worry it makes me look like less of a worthy person – less worthy of friends, or interest by other people, or inclusion in things by others. (And often realistically, less worth of a job.) And therefore, I have sometimes either stopped doing things I like, or become very defensive and sensitive about them. Failures and mistakes are vulnerable acts, and it is hard to focus on the next shot – instead of judging ourselves on what we screw up.
This often leads to thinking that we, as people, are either “good” or “bad.” We’re either good or bad at sports, good or bad at art, good or bad at music, good or bad at public speaking, good or bad at our jobs, good or bad at being a mother, father, sister, brother, daughter, son, and so on. We judge ourselves so often on this black and white framework, because it’s what we were taught. It’s easy, it’s straightforward. And if people are either good or bad, we can navigate the world quicker, easier, and know what is right and wrong.
This is the premise of The Good Place.
Humans earn and lose points on actions that are either good or bad. If they earn enough good points, they get into The Good Place (heaven). If not, they go to The Bad Place, aka hell. But the way the world has changed, it turns out, has made even the most contentious, good person, not able to earn enough points to make it into The Good Place. The system isn’t rigged by The Bad Place, as the characters thought, it’s simply that buying a tomato at the store now has so many negative implications, and doing almost anything at all, will cause you to lose points, or gain so few it doesn’t matter over the course of your life. This is not just true on the show – buying a tomato these days is so fraught with ethical implications there are entire organizations and advocacy groups that work on making buying food a positive ethical choice again.
We live in a world now where the terms “good” and “bad” are no longer helpful, but somehow we still try to live under that black and white framework, when the world is actually so, so gray – and so are we.
This became clear to me when, at the end of the episode with Bad Janet, Michael says, “We’ve been asking the wrong question.”
“It’s not whether people are good or bad, it’s if they’re trying to be better today than they were yesterday. You asked me where my hope comes from. That’s my answer.”
Michael hands Bad Janet a manifesto detailing this idea and the experiment so far. And as he lets Bad Janet go, she seems confused and almost emotional about all of this.
Hello again, tears. Hello again, irony. I dressed up as Bad Janet to have fun as a sassy bench on Halloween, only to find myself identifying with her more than I would like in this same day episode. Because I was confused and emotional about all of this.
“It’s not whether people are good or bad, it’s if they’re trying to be better today than they were yesterday,” shatters everything about society that we are fed to believe.
I technically knew that we live in a “gray” world, but I needed to hear so badly that what’s important isn’t to focus on being good or bad, but trying to be better. And hearing it from a TV show, a sitcom, made me cry. It made me believe it. For once, I felt like some part of our often-oppressive society told me that it’s okay for me to be flawed, to mess up, to fail, over and over again – to be human. And that no matter how much I screw up, that I am doing okay. That I am worthy of love and hope. Because by human nature, I will always try to be a better person than I was yesterday.
It’s a very Christian message, to be honest. It’s one that goes back thousands of years in human history – that humans are inherently flawed, but we are still worthy of love and forgiveness. That we will do bad, even awful things, but we are still worthy of love and forgiveness if we ask for them. It’s the message that Jesus practiced in his actions, that many other prophets and other religions preach around the world. But it’s also a very Christian framework that we live in (in America especially) to believe in a heaven and a hell, and that if we do enough good things, we’ll get into heaven – or be recognized by society and rewarded for our deeds. And if we don’t, well. We deserve to be tortured. Or ostracized. Or homeless, or poor. It’s a framework that says, “if you’re not a good person, you’re not a person.” Yikes.
And there are a lot of reasons to think that humans don’t deserve forgiveness or a second chance to improve – the premise of the final experiment on The Good Place. It’s easy to be Bad Janet. We still have war and genocide around the world, we still are not addressing climate change with the urgency it requires of a global critical mass, and humanity still tries to strip people they see as different than them of their rights, their votes, and their lives. Often because either consciously or unconsciously, we are taught to see the world in black and white; to see people as either good or bad.
And the confusion in Bad Janet’s eyes when Michael released her is an uncomfortable place to be. It’s where a lot of us are, I think. The place where you know there’s a better way to see the world and to live in it, but it goes against everything you thought was true. But to even get there, we need so many more Michaels – people who don’t give up on us, and who know what it is to have been “bad” and have grown from that… And to be patient with those of us, like Eleanor, who want to give up, or already have.
We need more Michaels because he loves humans unconditionally. Which is simply, to love. If your love is conditional on something someone does, like messing up, then it’s not love. If you’re focused on how it benefits you, it’s not love. If you’re focused on a points system and someone has to earn it, it’s not love. Love is giving a shirt about someone, even if you don’t know why, and forgiving them over and over, because you just love them.
But love doesn’t mean not holding people (or yourself!) accountable – it means not thinking less of them while they grow and become a better person. It means having faith in them, and not giving up, like Michael.
I first watched The Good Place show with someone who made me a much better person. He said over and over how I’d love the show, and I resisted for a long time. When I finally gave in, I was so happy I did. Watching the show brought us closer, it gave us important things to talk about, to laugh about, to cry about. I also introduced this show to someone who unknowingly broke my heart pretty badly. But he loves the show so much now, I can’t help but be glad for it all in the end.
And I still talk about The Good Place to anyone I can, because:
- If someone already watches it, we are on this journey together (whether they know it or not) to become better people.
- If they don’t, I get to entice them to join the rest of us in this experiment. Dressing up as Bad Janet was an excuse to do this as well – the intense black eye makeup and sexy outfit was just an extra perk.
And we can all assume (as this is the last season), but we don’t know how the show is going to end. We don’t know if they’re all going to get into The Good Place, or if humanity will be saved from eternal damnation due to an outdated points system. And I also don’t know if we’re going to act fast enough, or even “enough,” on climate change. I don’t know if I’m ever going to fall in love again, let alone with someone who loves me back. And it terrifies me that I don’t know any of the answers, that I don’t know what the future holds. And that it feels like it’s all on me, on us – the humans – to fix it. That it’s up to a girl from Iowa (or Sweden) to save the world somehow.
All I know is that even if the world goes past 2 degrees Celsius of warming, we still need people who want to be better each day. And even if I am heartbroken for the rest of my life, I’m still going to try to be the kind of person I’d want to date. And even if I keep screwing up – which I will, which we all will – I know that I’m going to try to be a slightly better person each day than the day before. That’s what makes us human, worth the benefit of the doubt, and always – always – worthy of love.
Michael serving some #MondayMotivation realness. #TheGoodPlace pic.twitter.com/LBRDvx3wZN
— Ted Danson (@TedDanson) November 4, 2019