“The Good Place” torques up the stakes, but much of what the series does is what comedy has been doing since it was invented
A THOUSAND GREAT comedies, from “Much Ado About Nothing” to “Annie Hall”, start off with characters whose flaws are making them miserable. The genius of “The Good Place”, the philosophical sitcom whose fourth and final season concludes on January 30th, is to make this self-inflicted torture an explicit part of its setup—indeed, of the structure of its universe.
As for the couples, they serve the function of juxtaposing character types. The lead pairing consists of Chidi , an indecisive moral-philosophy professor, and Eleanor , a hard-drinking misanthrope. She thinks she has landed in the real Good Place by mistake and begs Chidi’s help in learning ethics to avoid discovery, thus gradually becoming a better person. The second couple, in turn, serves as a foil to the first.
Obviously, there is plenty in “The Good Place” that does not fit into ancient Roman literary structures. Chidi and Eleanor’s relationship adheres to a dramatic form that seems to have developed much later: the love-hate, will-they-won’t-they romance. Mr Danson got his start in the 1980s as half of one of the great will-they-won’t-they couples, playing Sam to Shelley Long’s Diane on “Cheers”. It is a nuanced pleasure to watch him preside over a 21st-century version.
One person who took the philosophy of classical comedy seriously was Northrop Frye, a mid-20th-century literary critic. For Frye, comedy was the dramatic form through which the Greeks and Romans imagined how humans, with all their flaws, could be reconciled with the stringent demands of ethical norms and virtues. He located comedy’s essence in a famous line from “The Self-Tormentor”: “Nothing human is alien to me.
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