The Good Place

Airing from 2016 to 2020, The Good Place was an NBC sitcom created by Michael Shur.

After being killed, Eleanor Shellshtrop awakens in "The Good Place", a utopian afterlife to reward her for exceptionally good life as a human rights lawyer.

There's only one problem with that. Eleanor Shellshtrop is not a human rights lawyer and is most emphatically not a good person.

Confiding in her soulmate, Chidi Anagonye, Eleanor strives to become a better person, one worthy of the Good Place, lest she be sent to the Bad Place, learning ethics alongside silent Buddhist monk Jianyu Li and his soulmate, the superficial socialite Tahani Al-Jamil all while trying to hide from Micheal, the architect who designed the Good Place, and his assistant Janet.

Note: Several characters in the show are Walking Spoilers and the show is heavily serialized despite its comedy nature.

Tropes used in The Good Place include:

• A Form You Are Comfortable With: Every Bad Place employee is given a human suit so they can get the feel of how best to torture human beings. Michael's true form is a 6000 ft. tall fire squid.
• Abusive Parents:
  • Eleanor's parents weren't outright abusive to her but they were rather neglectful, giving her a heavily warped sense of morals.
  • Tahani's parents. They constantly pitted her and her sister Kamilah and made no bones about how inferior they viewed Tahani.
• Angry White Man: Brent. With all the entitlement that comes with the trope.
• Badass Finger-Snap: How Micheal uses his powers.
• Back for the Finale: Every character that was part of the four's life on Earth, and Doug Forcett, returns for the final episode.
• Balance Between Good and Evil: How the Demons see themselves. They've been told that the humans they get are bad and are doing their duty in punishing them.
• Being Good Sucks: The show is not shy about this. The rewards for being a good person are great, but it takes a lot to be one.
• Black and White Insanity: How the afterlife operates with their being no middle ground. Becomes a plot point in the third season. The system is outdated and continues to judge people based on Medieval standards, being unable to cope with the complex Grey and Gray Morality of the 21st century.
• Butt Monkey: "Shut up Glenn!"
• Celebrity Paradox: Despite Micheal's love for Friends, Lisa Kudrow (Phoebe) guest stars in the penultimate episode.
• Celestial Bureaucracy: A ridiculously complex and overwrought one.
• Cessation of Existence: At the very end, the four decide that the only way to fix the Good Place is to make this an option. The Good Place is like a vacation. And vacations are only special because they end.
• Comically Missing the Point: As Michal lampshades, Tahani's disgust that she died in Cleveland should not be her main takeaway from his story of how she died.
• Demoted to Extra: Vicki In-Universe. She's not pleased at becoming a Classically-Trained Extra.
• Didn't See That Coming: No one saw Eleanor confessing that she didn't belong in the Good Place.
• The Ending Changes Everything: The first season finale reveals that the four are all bad people and are all in the Bad Place.
• Exactly What It Says on the Tin: The Good Place is good and the Bad Place is bad.
• Evil All Along: The first season finale reveals Michael to be the Big Bad behind it all. He pulls a Heel Face Turn later on.
• Foreshadowing:
  • The first episode establishes that getting into the Good Place requires a ridiculously high point-count, so high that some of history's best cannot get in. Hinting that the requirement is so high that no one has gotten in for centuries.
  • In the first season, Chidi frequently complains about being under so much stress that he's getting a stomachache in paradise. Because he's not in paradise.
  • Chidi frequently mentions that he lived his life by trying to consider every consequence of a potential action before making it. Which is how the points are being counted. Something as innocent as buying flowers for a grandmother can be a net negative because the buyer used technology built by corrupt people and thus implicitly supported them.
• Freudian Excuse Is No Excuse:
  • In the first season, Eleanor used her parents' divorce to justify her crap behaviour throughout thirty odd years of life. As a literal demon says, 50% of all kids in America lived through a divorce and didn't become Jerkasses. Eleanor eventually realizes that this is a crap excuse and that she shouldn't hide behind it.
  • John in Season 4. Sure writing for tabloids paid the bills but being jealous of the celebrity doesn't justify how much he bullied and harassed every celebrity under the sun.
• Go to Alias: "Diana Tremaine" for Eleanor. Becomes rather important in Season 3 when Eleanor learns of someone using the name. Her still alive mother.
• Good Is Impotent: The Good Place Committee.
• Gone Horribly Right: Version 2.0 of Neighborhood 12358W. After Version 1.0 helped the four grow as people, Version 2.0 was designed to make them more miserable. It just clued them in even faster that this wasn't paradise.
• Gosh Dang It to Heck: An Enforced Trope. The Good Place is censored.
• Jesus Taboo: Justified. Although the Good Place and the Bad Place generally appear to be analogues to the Judeo-Christian afterlife, it's stated that the Bible, and all the other major religious texts, only got about 5% of the afterlife correctly. Though there are several celestial beings, none are outright labelled as God. And instead of Jesus being the saviour of humanity, it's Eleanor.
• Hell of a Heaven: The Good Place. It's so utterly perfect that people get bored of it very quickly and become "happiness" zombies.
• Humanity Ensues: Michael in the end.
• Incorruptible Pure Pureness: Everyone in Neighborhood 12358W. Which was all part of the ruse.
• Ironic Hell: Neighborhood 12358W. It's a Bad Place experiment in psychological torture.
• Mistaken Identity: What kicks off the plot. Two women named Eleanor Shellstrop died at the same time within close proximity of each other. Except it's all more of the ruse.
• Mr. Fanservice: Chris. He's been going to the gym.
• Never My Fault: Michael blames the failed Version 2 on Eleanor's note. Despite the fact that only Eleanor saw the note and his increased torture had made all four humans so miserable that they would have figured out without it.
• Not So Different: Eleanor notes this about herself and Michael in Season 2. To her discomfort, she only recognizes this after she learns that he's a literal demon.
• Outliving One's Offspring: Eleanor's mother and Jason's father were still kicking when their children died.
• Reality Ensues:
  • Do drugs in a safe with no air holes. See how long you last.
  • As Brent shows, some people will never change. Especially those who already think of themselves as good people and don't feel the need to change. Doubly so if they're already a senior citizen. Someone who feels that they've been a good person for sixty years isn't going to become a better person, especially if they think that attitude has already been rewarded.
  • Even if it's your favorite activity, doing it forever, and then still existing for eternity, will make it very boring.
• The Reveal:
  • There is no Jianyu. He's a DJ from Florida named Jason.
  • The first season finale reveals that this has been the Bad Place all along.
  • It's been 521 years since anyone got into the Good Place.
• Rewatch Bonus: The entirety of the first season takes on a massive new tone once it's revealed that Micheal is the Big Bad who has been manipulating the four in an Ironic Hell. As Eleanor herself lampshades, everything Michael did all season made at least one of the four miserable.
• Rousseau Was Right: The whole point of the show.
• Parody Sue: Everyone in Neighborhood 12358W lived an impossibly good life. They're all demons lying about this.
• Pokémon-Speak: "Maximum Derek!, Totally Derek!, Derek!" among others.
• Secret Test of Character: In the Season 2 finale, the Judge subjects the four to one each to see if they've gone through enough Character Development worthy of the Good Place. Only Eleanor passes.
  • In the end, the Bad Place is reworked into one, helping the deceased overcome their flaws.
• Shadow Archetype: Brent in Season 4 is a worse version of Season 1 Eleanor, showing what she could have become without Chidi pushing along her Character Development.
• Spanner in the Works: Eleanor managed to send a note warning herself of the first reboot. Michael makes sure that she can't in the later loops.
• Static Character: A large point is that the celestial beings are generally this, but that humans aren't.
• The Stoic: Shawn.
• Take That: Micheal Shur is as unsubtle as ever.
  • What pizza is served in the Bad Place? Hawaiian.
  • Being from France or Florida is an automatic ticket to the Bad Place.
    • If someone from Florida enters Tahani's bank, they close it down as a security measure.
  • The Bad Place has a spray that makes you smell like how the Bayverse feels: Loud and confusing.
  • The Bad Place's anthem? The Kars-4-Kids jingle.
  • William Shakespeare's torture involves being told the plot of the Entourage movie.
  • Brent, the series' Hate Sink, is based off US Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.
  • "Patty" all but stabs the Anti-Vaxxers in the heart when a man from ancient times, who died of a small cut, asks why people in the 21st century would be dumb enough not to take one.
• Timey-Wimey Ball: Time on Earth moves in a straight line. Time in the afterlife moves in such a way that the timeline kinda looks like "Jeremy Bearimy" in cursive English. It even has the dot on the "i" which is Tuesday, July and sometimes, "never", the moment where nothing ever happens.
• Too Dumb to Live: Jason. He locked himself in a safe with no air holes and did drugs while inside.
• Undignified Death: Everyone.
  • Eleanor was struck by a billboard truck advertising erectile dysfunction pills.
  • Chidi was crushed by a falling air conditioner.
  • Jason suffocated in a safe while he and his idiot friend tried to rob a restaurant.
  • Tahani was crushed by a gigantic gold statue of her sister. In Cleveland.
• Void Between the Worlds: IHOP, the Interdimensional Hole of Pancakes. It's like the Grand Central Station of space/time and is the most dangerous place in all creation.
• Wants a Prize For Basic Decency: A Discussed Trope. People, just naturally, do expect some form of reward for good deeds, even something as simple as a "thank you" for holding a door open, and it's questioned if that invalidates the goodness of the act, given that it was arguably done for selfish reasons. Tahani raised billions of pounds for charity but all that means nothing given that she only did it to stick it to her family.