In the penultimate episode of “The Good Place,” after four seasons wandering the afterlife, our dear-departed heroes finally make it to the destination promised in the title. It is, of course, beautiful, with lush gardens and buildings with alabaster walls.
It’s also familiar. The first time I watched, I felt like I knew this place. Was I recovering a memory from another life, or a state before life? Had I — good Lord — had I been to heaven?
Turns out I had, kind of. It took a few minutes of searching my memory and Google Images to realize that the location the producers chose to represent the Good Place was … the Getty Center, the art museum in the hills overlooking Los Angeles.
It’s a fitting choice for a humanist Hollywood reboot of paradise. “The Good Place,” whose finale airs Thursday night on NBC, is a slapstick survey of moral philosophy that places its faith not in a higher power (or a lower one) but in human culture and creation.
It’s also a visual echo of another great comedy, the zoologically incorrect Hollywood satire “BoJack Horseman,” whose final eight episodes arrive on Netflix Friday. Its title sequence begins with a wide shot of the cliffside house where the title character (Will Arnett), an anthropomorphic horse and former ’90s sitcom star, has spent six seasons chugging booze, pills and the occasional chaser of remorse.
If heaven is in the L.A. hills, so is hell. And over the past several years, these two comedies have wandered the crooked path between the two, trying to figure out how to be a decent person in a fallen world. (...)
The moral universe of “BoJack” is darker and messier than its NBC counterpart. Even its aesthetic is baroque, Hieronymus Bosch-like, compared with the clean, jewel-tone fantasy of “The Good Place.”
In “BoJack,” there are no cosmic do-overs, no second or two-thousandth chances. In one of the final episodes, BoJack imagines seeing a long-dead friend, who tells him: “There is no other side. This” — i.e., mortal life — “is it.”
It’s a dark statement. But dark is not the same as hopeless. Really, “BoJack” is making a kind of moral argument from atheism. In its universe, you have to do right not because you might end up in The Bad Place but because this, right here, is the only place.
Where “BoJack” is most like “The Good Place” is that it, too, is about the moral obligation to help others to be good. But it’s complicated; the show is also aware of the blurry line between help and enabling.
Throughout the series, BoJack is bailed out and pulled from the brink by others: his friend Mr. Peanutbutter (Paul F. Tompkins), a chuckleheaded Labrador retriever; his overstressed feline agent, Princess Caroline (Amy Sedaris); and his ghostwriter-turned-confidante, Diane (Alison Brie).
But Diane — as close as anything to the show’s moral center — starts to wonder if she’s really helping BoJack improve or (à la Dr. Melfi counseling Tony Soprano) just making him a more efficient miscreant. There’s an entire showbiz industry built around performative contrition, and BoJack has mastered its turns and straightaways like Secretariat. (He walks out of one supposedly harrowing confessional interview as if he’d aced the SAT: “I felt like I could see the matrix!”)
If “The Good Place” is how we need to raise one another up, “BoJack” is often about the need not to let one another off the hook. At the end of Season 5, for instance, Diane rejects BoJack’s plea that she write an exposé on him after a #MeToo incident, realizing that she’d just be stage-managing his redemption theater.
But she’s also reluctant to cut him off entirely. As she says, toward the end of the series: “Maybe it’s everybody’s job to save each other.”
As different as “The Good Place” and “BoJack” are in tone, each in its absurdist way gets at a piece of the current moment, in which many of our public fights are as much about morality — complicity, complacency, enabling — as they are about politics. In very different ways, both shows ask: Is being good simply an individual act that you can undertake in isolation? Is it enough to tend your personal moral garden if you allow evil to flourish around you?
by James Poniewozik, NY Times | Read more:
Image: BoJack Horseman, Netflix
It’s also familiar. The first time I watched, I felt like I knew this place. Was I recovering a memory from another life, or a state before life? Had I — good Lord — had I been to heaven?
Turns out I had, kind of. It took a few minutes of searching my memory and Google Images to realize that the location the producers chose to represent the Good Place was … the Getty Center, the art museum in the hills overlooking Los Angeles.It’s a fitting choice for a humanist Hollywood reboot of paradise. “The Good Place,” whose finale airs Thursday night on NBC, is a slapstick survey of moral philosophy that places its faith not in a higher power (or a lower one) but in human culture and creation.
It’s also a visual echo of another great comedy, the zoologically incorrect Hollywood satire “BoJack Horseman,” whose final eight episodes arrive on Netflix Friday. Its title sequence begins with a wide shot of the cliffside house where the title character (Will Arnett), an anthropomorphic horse and former ’90s sitcom star, has spent six seasons chugging booze, pills and the occasional chaser of remorse.
If heaven is in the L.A. hills, so is hell. And over the past several years, these two comedies have wandered the crooked path between the two, trying to figure out how to be a decent person in a fallen world. (...)
The moral universe of “BoJack” is darker and messier than its NBC counterpart. Even its aesthetic is baroque, Hieronymus Bosch-like, compared with the clean, jewel-tone fantasy of “The Good Place.”
In “BoJack,” there are no cosmic do-overs, no second or two-thousandth chances. In one of the final episodes, BoJack imagines seeing a long-dead friend, who tells him: “There is no other side. This” — i.e., mortal life — “is it.”
It’s a dark statement. But dark is not the same as hopeless. Really, “BoJack” is making a kind of moral argument from atheism. In its universe, you have to do right not because you might end up in The Bad Place but because this, right here, is the only place.
Where “BoJack” is most like “The Good Place” is that it, too, is about the moral obligation to help others to be good. But it’s complicated; the show is also aware of the blurry line between help and enabling.
Throughout the series, BoJack is bailed out and pulled from the brink by others: his friend Mr. Peanutbutter (Paul F. Tompkins), a chuckleheaded Labrador retriever; his overstressed feline agent, Princess Caroline (Amy Sedaris); and his ghostwriter-turned-confidante, Diane (Alison Brie).
But Diane — as close as anything to the show’s moral center — starts to wonder if she’s really helping BoJack improve or (à la Dr. Melfi counseling Tony Soprano) just making him a more efficient miscreant. There’s an entire showbiz industry built around performative contrition, and BoJack has mastered its turns and straightaways like Secretariat. (He walks out of one supposedly harrowing confessional interview as if he’d aced the SAT: “I felt like I could see the matrix!”)
If “The Good Place” is how we need to raise one another up, “BoJack” is often about the need not to let one another off the hook. At the end of Season 5, for instance, Diane rejects BoJack’s plea that she write an exposé on him after a #MeToo incident, realizing that she’d just be stage-managing his redemption theater.
But she’s also reluctant to cut him off entirely. As she says, toward the end of the series: “Maybe it’s everybody’s job to save each other.”
As different as “The Good Place” and “BoJack” are in tone, each in its absurdist way gets at a piece of the current moment, in which many of our public fights are as much about morality — complicity, complacency, enabling — as they are about politics. In very different ways, both shows ask: Is being good simply an individual act that you can undertake in isolation? Is it enough to tend your personal moral garden if you allow evil to flourish around you?
by James Poniewozik, NY Times | Read more:
Image: BoJack Horseman, Netflix
