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The Very Good Memes Of 'The Good Place'

The Very Good Memes Of 'The Good Place'
The humans of NBC's
Colleen Hayes/NBC
The humans of NBC's

“Welcome! Everything is fine.”

So reads a large sign that faces Eleanor Shellstrop (Kristen Bell) in the opening scene of the NBC sitcom “The Good Place.” Sitting in a nondescript lobby, she’s soon beckoned into an office where a man named Michael (Ted Danson), seemingly in charge of things, tells her that she’s dead. In fact, Eleanor died after being hit by a truck advertising an erectile dysfunction pill and has landed in the afterlife ― specifically, in the Good Place, a nondenominational version of what we might call “heaven.”

There’s just one problem: Eleanor isn’t the angelic human rights lawyer Michael thinks she is. During her lifetime, she actually peddled scam medication to senior citizens over the phone, so, she worries, she probably should have been sent to the Bad Place. Someone royally forked up. Oh, also, she can’t swear: In their neighborhood of the Good Place, the obscenities are converted into inoffensive phonetic siblings ― fork, shirt, bench ― since apparently the well-behaved residents don’t care for vulgarity.

For the meme-conscious, it should have been clear from that first moment that something would be rotten in the Good Place. “Everything is fine,” with its anxious and slightly defensive assurance, almost exactly echoes “This is fine,” a meme that originated in the webcomic “Gunshow” by K.C. Green in 2013. In the comic, a dog sits obliviously amid flames as the room he’s in burns down.

“This is fine,” the dog says. “That’s okay, things are going to be okay.”

Things rapidly devolve from “fine” to “maybe not fine” to “catastrophic” in “The Good Place.” (If you haven’t watched the show, be aware that this article contains major spoilers.) There, Eleanor meets her soulmate, Chidi, who was a professor of ethics and moral philosophy, and their neighbors, insecure socialite Tahani and Buddhist monk Jianyu. She quickly discovers that Jianyu represents another case of mistaken identity ― he’s actually Jason, a low-level criminal and professional amateur DJ from Florida. Eventually, she confides in Chidi, who undertakes to teach the seemingly misplaced Jason and Eleanor ethics so that they will be good enough people to stay. The stress of lying to Michael gnaws at his psyche the whole time.

At the end of the first season, though, everything changes. It turns out Michael is a demon, and he’s been torturing the four humans the whole time. The ambitious experiment was his brainchild, in which he hoped to goad Eleanor, Chidi, Tahani and Jason into tormenting one another for what he anticipated would be thousands of years. They were never in the Good Place at all. Cue Eleanor’s show-stopping revelation: “This is the Bad Place!”

And lo, a meme was born.

On liberal Twitter, Kristen Bell’s puckish face and raised finger, positioned above the words “This is the Bad Place!”, serve as a ubiquitous, catchall response to every new horrific bit of news out of the White House today. The phrase is both comically mild and comically extreme: We’re literally in hell, but we’re going to say it with a smile.

It’s fitting that a sitcom would provide the meme for our new era, our reality-show presidency and our dystopian political landscape. At heart, sitcoms are meme delivery vehicles. As an art form, the sitcom doesn’t distinguish itself through narrative, character development, suspense or complexity; it’s repetitive, comforting and populated by archetypes. Where the sitcom excels is in repackaging the familiar, over and over again.

The best sitcoms provide us with a vocabulary for talking about our lives ― our quotidian lives, in particular. Shows like “Seinfeld” and “The Office” and “Friends” played out on tiny stages, just large enough to depict friendship quandaries, workplace hijinks and love triangles. They give us Platonic templates for our messy, specific problems: A workplace crush is so Jim and Pam, an overeager coworker is a Leslie Knope, and Ross and Rachel were on a break (maybe). They give us stock phrases, too, like “Did I do that?” and “That’s what she said” and “Yada yada yada.”

But in a time when pervasive, existential political angst has assumed the primary role in our private lives as well as our public ones, “Friends” GIFs simply won’t cut it. For the endless, despair-filled dialogues about our broken presidency and rising white supremacist violence, we need more than the anodyne yuks of a group of pals who frequent a coffee shop. We need memes about the loss of hope and innocence, and about the quandary of trying to be better people while living in a terrible world we mostly deserve. That’s exactly what “The Good Place” provides ― at least for viewers on the liberal side of the spectrum.

Given the gaping chasm between the left and right in 2018, that might be the most any TV show can accomplish. In July, Todd VanDerWerff argued that traditional, family-centered, multi-camera sitcoms like “The Carmichael Show” and “Mom” might be the salvation of our political discourse, as they incorporate political jousting into their comedy. “They all look at a deeply fractured America and see room for humor — modern-day ‘All in the Family’-style shows that see every argument between right and left as an opportunity to tweak the foibles of both,” he wrote. VanderWerff’s statement presumes that political conversation between left and right hasn’t already broken down. But it has. Sadly, conversation today takes place largely within the left and the right. Those who feel President Donald Trump is an imminent threat to the nation have little to say to those who believe he’s restoring America’s greatness.

For TV watchers in the former group, “The Good Place” has proven to be a startlingly realistic allegory for their own perception of America today. Startling, of course, because it’s on the unrealistic side for a sitcom. It’s a genre largely set in cubicle farms, living rooms, bars and diners. But “The Good Place” is set in the afterlife. The premise made it sound so hokey that I avoided it until midway through the first season. I gagged at the prospect of “The Office (Afterlife).” Instead, it’s “No Exit (The Sitcom),” a suspenseful comedy in which the stakes are enormous (eternal torment), the twists and turns thrilling, and the result always the same: They’re in the Bad Place.

What better comedy alter-ego for a world in which every new Russia investigation update and presidential tweet occasions immense sturm und drang, but deposits us exactly where we were before, with a racist imbecile as president and a sociopathic GOP platform setting the agenda?

For many left-leaning viewers ― specifically people who failed to vote or phone-bank for Hillary Clinton, people who didn’t want to ruin Thanksgiving by talking politics with their racist relatives, white people in general ― there’s also a sense of sinking culpability mirrored in “The Good Place.” We are the reason we’re here. Eleanor’s primary form of torture is her acute awareness that she doesn’t deserve eternal bliss. She was a selfish grifter, unpleasant to everyone she encountered, and openly amoral. She’s desperate to stay in the Good Place, and to try, however unevenly, to deserve it, but she knows she was the architect of her own misery.

Still, Eleanor has a rebellious sense that she doesn’t quite deserve the Bad Place, either. “I was a medium person,” she says helplessly. “I should get to spend eternity in a medium place.” The punishment, like the Trump presidency, feels disproportionate to the crime.

“The Good Place” would be notable simply for pulling off such a neat bit of timely commentary, for eerily reflecting the Trump era without directly engaging with it at all. But it doesn’t just offer commentary; it’s a primer for us to have tough, timely conversations. Its sitcom framework makes it perfectly suited to building an idiom for us to speak about politics.

Sitcoms thrive on simplicity and repetition, and in certain ways “The Good Place” subverts this expectation, with its “Lost”-inspired setting and suspenseful narrative. But it simultaneously makes the repetition overt ― each time Michael’s experiment fails and the humans figure out they’re in the Bad Place, he reboots everything and starts from the beginning (the second time, the sign reads “Welcome! Everything is great!”). In one episode, we watch Eleanor, Chidi, Tahani and Jason go through dozens of reboots, each ending the same way: “This is the Bad Place!” On a drama, we’d only get to see that revelation once; on a sitcom, we need to see it over and over again. The repetition ad absurdum transforms the horrifying into the silly, and repackages a dramatic reveal as a catchphrase.