I don’t watch a ton of ongoing television, especially with this all gaming all the time lifestyle I lead, so when I really get into a current TV show (naturally or by appreciated forced recommendation) it must be something special. Michael Schur’s The Good Place, which is rapidly approaching its series finale, is a very special TV show.
However, while catching up with the first season and a half of The Good Place I began to think about why it’s so special. Yeah it’s hilarious and features great characters including Little Ted Danson. And yes its structure and philosophical verging on theological themes are a thousand times smarter than what you’d expect from a network sitcom. But it’s more than that, and it took until this hiatus for the truth to finally click for me (just like the characters on the show).
The Good Life is a TV show I love that uses many of the same ideas of a video game genre I hate. The Good Place is the only good roguelike. But to explain why requires serious spoilers, so go watch all of this great show and then come back here to keep reading.
For a comedy, The Good Place’s plot is surprisingly serialized. You pretty much need to watch all the episodes in order to figure out what is going on. But here’s the initial premise. After dying on Earth, Eleanor Shellstrop (Kristen Bell) awakens in a non-specific Heaven-type afterlife called “The Good Place” run by a non-specific immortal Angel-type being named Michael (Ted Danson). However, since Eleanor is an obviously terrible person, she realizes she was placed here by mistake. To avoid being sent to non-specific Hell “The Bad Place” she recruits friends Chidi, Tahani, and Jason to become a better, more ethical person.
At least, that’s the premise until the end of the first season. Once again, spoiler alert! In a fantastic twist it’s revealed that Eleanor and her allies are in fact all bad people who have been unintentionally torturing themselves and each other in a new version of The Bad Place made to look like The Good Place. Michael, it turns out, is a demon, which we really should’ve guessed based on Ted Danson’s devilish casting.
The second season features a deliriously entertaining new status quo. Michael keeps erasing the humans’ memories and resetting “The Good Place,” only for Eleanor and friends to realize the truth time and again like cockroaches refusing to die. Left with no other options, Michael teams up with the humans for a kind of armistice so he can get them all into the Real Good Place and avoid eternal damnation. That’s where we’re at now. But doesn’t the beginning of this season remind you of something?
As the characters get constantly reset once they “beat” Michael’s game, they lose all of their progress and belongings. They keep getting placed in slightly tweaked and randomized versions of the authored same space with similarly difficult challenges meant to torture them forever. They try to grow as much as possible during each run but each time it’s all for not. Eleanor laments that they can never learn and improve if they keep losing those experiences and relationships.
You get it? They’re basically trapped in a roguelike, the oh-so popular and increasingly nebulous subgenre embraced by independent game developers. As a gaming genre, roguelikes are all about endless, super difficult, randomized challenges where players try to make significant progress but always lose it all. Even the “score” you earned on Earth stops once you reach The Good Place.
Whether it’s Enter the Gungeon’s firearm fortress, Tumbleseed’s minimal mountain, Spelunky’s kooky caves, or Michael’s Good Place, no experience is permanent in a roguelike. The idea is that players gain a better understanding of the mechanics as they die, but that’s cold comfort after each discouraging reset. Roguelikes are Hell, so it’s perfect and beautiful that a show like The Good Place uses roguelike structure to depict a very frustrating, and effective, kind of Hell.
So why is The Good Place very good while the roguelikes it apes are, in my opinion, very not? Well when you watch and enjoy The Good Place you don’t get your experiences taken away from you. You as the viewer get to see and save the bigger picture and stories building on top of each other into something greater. Instead of suffering through the promise of a sputtering player character arc when trudging through a roguelike, you get the satisfaction of watching actual authored elegant character arcs. The Good Place is about watching others play a roguelike, not a playing a roguelike yourself, and that’s a key difference.
Also, the show’s endgame has now taken the position that this repeating afterlife is very cruel and doesn’t actually help people. The proposed alternative has people remembering at least some vague memory of their former existence after a reboot in the hopes that would help them improve. Not a roguelike, but a much more fair roguelite progression system.
I can’t wait to see how The Good Place ends. The show has creatively, ingeniously put itself into a position where it can do anything it wants and it will feel earned. And it’s so cool that the show got there by, intentionally or not, making the best television out of the worst of gaming. Eat your heart out, Westworld. Now someone just needs to make an actual The Good Place roguelike game. Janet is basically Navi already.
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