In NBC's new comedy, The Good Place -- created by Michael Schur (The Office, Parks and Recreation, Brooklyn Nine-Nine), with Drew Goddard (Marvel's Daredevil, Lost, Cabin in the Woods, The Martian) directing the pilot and executive producing along with Schur -- Kristen Bell's Eleanor is an ordinary woman who enters a heavenly afterlife after a clerical error mistakes her for one of the world's best and noble people. From there, her slice of paradise starts malfunctioning because of her mere presence, confounding her resident guide and overseer, Michael (Ted Danson).
The cast and creators of this new series sat for a Q&A panel at the Television Critics Association summer press tour where Schur spoke about how different this project was from Parks and Recreation. "The pilot is a pretty good template for what is an average episode for this show," he explained. "It has a contained story, and then at the end something kind of dramatic happens and it sends the show spiraling off into a different place. The model for this show, in some ways, in my own head, is Lost."
"I love [Lost]," Schur continued. "Damon Lindelof was one of the first people I called when I had the idea and I took him out to lunch and said, 'We're going to play a game called Is This Anything?' where I pitch you an idea and you tell me if it's anything. And he gave me a lot of wonderful advice. And the reason I called him and wanted his advice is because the way I was imagining it going was sort of in a Lost way of cliffhangers and kind of big events and dramatic shifts that change the course of the characters' lives and stuff like that in every episode. Damon is also the reason that Drew directed the pilot."
"I've been such a fan of Mike's for years," Goddard chimed in. "If you look at sort of the story of modern comedy, it all branches out from Mike Schur. And I just feel like he's always been someone I want to work with."
In The Good Place, only the word's best people - the upper echelon - get to ascend to a sublime personality-tailored afterlife, with Schur insisting that a lot of thought went into the system involved for getting approved - which was one of "pure justice." Like, if you cut someone off in traffic that would be "negative 8 points" he explained.
"My sort of secret hope was that there is an omniscient system that we're all being judged by," he stated. "It's impartial and definitive and absolute, and you don't have to worry about judging bias. It's just, like, this is the system. These are the points, plus and minus. The most fun part of the pilot, I think, of putting it together was writing 10,000 jokes for the various crimes when Ted is doing the movie where he's explaining it, the plus and minus crimes and their point values."
Ultimately, Schur wasn't aiming for this to be a religious show of any kind. He just wanted to explore what it means to be a good person. "When I started doing research for the show, I was reading a lot of books about religious conceptions of the afterlife across all world religions," he shared. "Which, by the way, are fascinating. And then, after I did all that reading for like a month straight, I realized that it was utterly irrelevant and I didn't need to do any of it because the show wasn't a religious show. Religion is almost irrelevant. It's really about ethics. And then I had to start all over and read a bunch of ethics that I'd never read, which is also great but so much harder to read."
So if Bell's character, Eleanor, isn't supposed to be in The Good Place, does that mean she's bad person per se? Not really. She's "not evil" as Schur insists. "She's been living by this guideline that isn't it every man for himself and shouldn't I be putting myself first? So her, I guess, road to learn how to be a good person is really learning about incorporating other people into her world view."
"What I love most about Eleanor," Bell herself explained, "is the fact that she just lets her tongue loose. She has no edit button or tact. She just says what she's thinking and what she's feeling at all times. And the great thing about it is it's usually also inarguable, but it's just not necessarily the right and kindest thing to say in the moment."
The Good Place will air its first two episodes on Monday, September 19th, from 10 to 11pm before settling into his original time slot with a new episode on Thursday at 8:30pm, beginning September 22nd.
Additional reporting by Eric Goldman.
Matt Fowler is a writer for IGN and a member of the Television Critics Association (TCA). Follow him on Twitter at @TheMattFowler and Facebook at http://ift.tt/1kiBJkp.
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