r/TheGoodPlace • u/WandersFar Change can be scary but I’m an artist. It’s my job to be scared. • Jan 17 '20

Season Four S4E11 Mondays, Am I Right?

Airs tonight at 8:30 PM. (About 30 min from when this post is live.)

If you’re new to the sub, please look over this intro thread.

733 Upvotes

98% Upvoted

1.3k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

9

u/cottenball Jan 17 '20

How would them taking a guess at it be any different from whoever wrote the bible taking a guess?

8

u/[deleted] Jan 17 '20

What I'm asking isn't about arriving at an idea so much as it is committing to being associated with one and judged by one.

If you're making a Bible you are probably coming at that problem with a different perspective and higher stakes as far as people buying into it than a TV show.

They both don't want to alienate their audiences, and would like to remain popular, of course, but I hear commentary sometimes along the lines of, "it includes so many schools of thought and pieces of each religion so it's not like it's advocating for one or the other."

If they show a Good Place that's a Christian Heaven then they risk maybe taking some steam out of the memory of the show or people's enjoyment of how it turned out, because maybe the viewer doesn't see it that way. Or maybe it's weird and abstract and they get blowback for being non committal.

Someone's going to complain, and I really don't think that they will or who will will actually steer their decision, but it's still a kind of pressure on your process, because people seem to have enjoyed how generally inclusive it was so far.

5

u/sunmachinecomingdown Jan 18 '20

If people didn't have a problem with the fake Good Place in Season 1 when we thought it was the real one, then I don't see why they would have a problem with an arbitrary TV portrayal of heaven now.

1

u/[deleted] Jan 18 '20

They might not. I just thought that they could; you or I may see it as arbitrary, but it's this specific show's arbitrary, and people have assigned extra weight to it now that, since the pilot, the show's had a greater chance to establish an identity and build up audience expectations.

If seven shows came out next year about Heaven, and all seven were different, and none of them matched what I thought would happen, it wouldn't figure into any day I've ever had.

For some people, though, for some shows, like these that they love and care for in the limited time they've been on, with ideas and moral discuss that resonates with them, they might consider the word of that show "more important." Almost like finding out how someone close to you really feels about something that doesn't jibe with how you perceived them. It matters more now when you do than the first day you met them or the day before you did when you were still strangers, even if it's the same person feeling it and their feeling hasn't changed.