I don’t know how well these things scale. Is shoot 13 40m episodes equivalent to shooting 26 20m episodes?
Either way I want more! The actors and their families be damned. More! More! More!
I was complaining about BBC stuff being so short and someone explained it’s because it’s often a single writer. The US has a showrunner and a team of writers.
I suppose you can’t simply double the amount of drivers and get double the amount of output. It doesn’t work that way. At some point, additional people are going to be a detriment to quality output. Not to mention disagreements because people are people, we’re not simply stamping out cookies from a mold.
I thought on one of the podcasts they mentioned that they shoot much more material per episode, and have to cut it down dramatically to 20 minutes. Later on when they release the episodes digitally, they are a bit longer (25+ minutes.) I caught up on the good place watching the first two seasons all in one run, and the episodes were all a bit longer than this season’s on-air versions.
I’ve got a feeling we’re gonna find out that there’s like just 4 people on the Good Place, total.
I can’t wait to see who the 4 people are. I really hope it is like 3 randos and one odd choice for a historical person. Maybe a caveman as well.
Nobody new has been in the good place in 500 years, but I’m pretty sure if you go back in the episodes to the first few, they list a ton of people from the last 100 years that have entered the good place…
Either Michael is wrong about that (and has no idea who’s in the good place, and not sure why anyone would have lied to him, since he’s on the “evil” side) or it’s just a huge plot hole.
Example: Did you know the most popular podcast in the good place is Mozart and Jimi Hendrix talking about music. Jini Hendrix…500 years. (I know it’s just a TV show, AND I REALLY SHOULD RELAX! It’s mystery science theater…)
Without going back to check:
a) Could Michael not have been lying?
b) Just because it’s the most popular podcast. doesn’t mean they’re in the Good Place.
Michael at the time was a lying liar interested only in torturing them, so, unless it was Janet who told them, I wouldn’t think it a plot hole.
I don’t remember which episode you are referring to or I would look a little harder (the show is on Netflix) but I remember there was a scene where he talks about all the people that went to the bad place that you would find surprising, but I don’t remember anyone being talked about going to the Good Place.
My reference is to the PODCAST for the show, you can listen to the first 20 seconds of the podcast and get it.
Also:
Ending slavery is a big bonus—Abraham Lincoln is the only U.S. president in The Good Place.
Drawn from:
Let the contortions continue!
Last edit: Mindy St. Claire is the best person to have existed in 521 years, as she didn’t go to the bad place, but the neutral place. So her act of ALMOST doing something was better than everyone else actually doing things
(Even the “Michael is an unreliable narrator” doesn’t get around this.)
-Jim
I don’t believe the podcast is canon. :)
Michael only knows as much about the system as he’s been told. Demons are clearly not anywhere near omniscient, evidenced by his deception of Sean. So, Michael could be not lying, but could also just be wrong about who’s gotten in where. He’d only know what he was told: he was genuinely surprised to learn that nobody has been in the Good Place for 500+ years.
That’s also kind of assuming that the Accountant’s claims of being unhackable are correct.
3 billion accountants have to have consensus on the point value on a new action in order to clear it, that’s pretty hard to hack. Much better returns would be to hack the single point of failure in the central database, and change point values after the fact. One long term approqch here would be to gradually decrease the point values of each action, so that auditing in the short term is less likely to identify sudden disparities in point values.
Would Janets know about the hacking? Probably not. Janets have perfect knowledge of the mortal world, but they do not have perfect knowledge of the afterlife, otherwise, e.g. the Trolley Problem gambit wouldn’t have worked.
If Mindy’s single good action was a net new action to the universe, it would have been assigned a new point value at the time she did it, thereby bypassing the hacking impact (we can infer that this may be the case because Mindy’s case was apparently unprecedented). By this interpretation, Mindy may properly have been properly destined for the Good Place. In fact, the only hope anybody would have of getting onto the good place would be to consistently perform unique good acts that had never been performed before.
There isn’t all that much evidence for this theory, but if you want fan-wank theorizing, it’s fun and easy to justify almost anything.
If there’s one thing I’ve grown to learn about The Good Place and Michael Schur, it’s that he doesn’t make any decisions arbitrarily. So given that, who do you think was the last person to get into the Good Place 500 years ago? He needs to have a specific answer in mind, right?
So wait, are people taking Michael telling Eleanor stuff in the opening of season 1, you know, when he’s a demon who’s set up a fake Good Place to get them to torture one another and almost everything he says over the entire season is a complete lie, as how things actually work? Because, uh, I probably wouldn’t.
Im not sure what you’re referring to. I don’t think anybody is using that a a single source reference. Everything about how the “system” works, e.g. the points, Doug Forsett, etc. has been reiterated at other times.
For some stuff, like specific examples that Michael may have given when decefing the humans, and not since (e.g. stealing baguettes loses points because it makes you more French), there’s no reason to believe that Michael was lying, because he’s on the record as saying he kept as much of it true as possible to enhance believability (and presumably his ability to sell the lying parts).
Specifically the above. There’s no reason to believe that this is valid information.
I dislike unreliable narrators, especially when you can start to ask “so what IS real?”. Is the judge real, or was that an upper-level hell denizen who Michael wasn’t high enough ranked to know about? Maybe they were never rebooted on earth, but were sent to a different level of hell? Is Michael being tortured by his former co-workers for siding with the humans, and they are still in hell? Does anything really matter?
Michael Schur does address this in the podcast and other places. Everything is real aside from Michael’s initial deception.
Michael’s offhand comments about people who are in the Good Place don’t have much weight vis a vis the cosmology in general, IMO. Either he was lying, or he was just making assumptions about the kind of people that typically should get into the Good Place. He’s no omniscient, and he doesn’t know much about the actual Good Place, given that he’s a relatively low-level Bad Place employee.
Yeah, it would be pretty terrible writing to continue pulling that sort of “oh, nothing you’ve been told so far is real” reveal after the first time. But the show’s actually been pretty clear that the first season was all Michael’s scheme (with a few foundational truths that have been reiterated in later episodes) but everything we’ve learned from then on has been legit.
Just got caught up on Janet(s). Holy crap that was amazing.