Characters / The Good Place - Michael

The Good Place — Character Index
Neighborhood 12358W (Michael) | The Afterlife | Earth

Michael

"You humans have so many emotions! You only need two: anger and confusion!"

Portrayed by: Ted Danson

"There's something so human about taking something great, and ruining it a little, so you can have more of it."

The architect of neighborhood 12358W and an otherworldly being with a unique and endless fascination with humans. When the first neighborhood he ever created is thrown into chaos by Eleanor's presence, he attempts to maintain morale and good cheer despite the ever-growing list of problems that threaten his perfectly designed harmony of the Good Place.

...or so it seems. In reality, Michael is actually a Bad Place architect and the neighborhood is his personal pet project to psychologically torture small sets of humans for eternity, with Eleanor, Chidi, Tahani, and Jason as his first subjects. Once their repeated successes in figuring out the truth threaten to get Michael retired, he forms an uneasy alliance with them to find a way to save themselves only to find himself growing increasingly fond of them and humanity in general.

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A to H

• Actor Allusion:
  • In the Season 2 finale, Michael goes undercover as a bartender, which is a reference to Ted Danson's character on Cheers.
  • After he becomes human and signs up for guitar lessons in the finale, the instructor is played by Danson's actual wife.
• Admiring the Abomination: He adores and is delighted by the mundanities and annoyances of daily life. He laughs in joy when he burns his hand on a microwave meal because he didn't know how hot it would get and achieves his life goal by getting a useless reward card as junkmail and finally getting to tell someone to "Take it sleazy".
• Affably Evil: When it is revealed that he is actually a demon (or whatever Bad Place employees are). His polite and fun-loving mannerisms are the only elements of his true personality that shine through.
• A Form You Are Comfortable With: He's some kind of higher entity who is not quite used to having a human body. Apparently, his true form is a 6000-foot "fire squid".
• Always Save the Girl: He admits in that he's willing to save the four humans even if it means messing up the timeline beyond repair or trying to reset it when he knows the Judge will do worse than murder him for his meddling.
• Arc Villain: For Season 1. Michael is a Bad Place architect posing as one from the Good Place, and has designed his neighborhood to look like the Good Place, but is really a Bad Place neighborhood designed to force Eleanor, Chidi, Tahani, and Jason to psychologically torture each other for all eternity.
• Ascended Demon: By the end of Season 2, he's genuinely become a noble, kinder person who's willing to sacrifice himself for the safety and happiness of his new friends. Considering it goes against a demon's very nature to be good, that says a lot about how far he's come. Eventually taken to its highest possible conclusion in "Patty" when he is made the official owner of the real Good Place before he becomes human.
• The Atoner: By Season 3, he clearly wants nothing to do with his former demon life, and tries to make up for all the torturing he put Eleanor, Chidi, Tahani and Jason through, confirmed by Season 4 as something he feels major guilt about.
• Author Avatar: Is one for showrunner Michael Schur, someone who devising awkward and dramatic scenarios for the only few characters that matter (Team Cockroach) while rendering everyone else (the other Good Place citizens who turned out to be other demons) and everything else (Janet and the "Fake Good Place") to plot devices to drive the story (to cause team Cockroach to torture each other).
• Badass Fingersnap: Clicks his fingers to use his powers in various ways.
• Bad Boss: While running his subsequent reboots, he eventually became this to the demons. While Michael has a point that some of them like Chris are incompetent, he's also quite nasty to them and venting his frustration about the humans becoming better people to each one, while ignoring their ideas of running torture. It gets to the point where they all lose faith in him and wait for the next fingersnap. Vicky is able to use this to mount a coup and blackmail Michael into giving her control, and it means his former employees are quite willing to drag him and the humans back to the Bad Place, no questions asked. It also means they don't understand recreating his experiment of torture, and Vicky has to step in and translate it into demon analogies.
• Bad Liar: It turns out his inherent ability to lie well was part of his demon powers. The second he sets foot on Earth, he starts to lose it — after spending a year down there, his lies are comically transparent.
• Became Their Own Antithesis: He spent eons working for the Bad Place believing that humans are stupid beings who deserve to be tortured, but after the many, many failed attempts at running his neighborhood (with the failures being caused by the humans not being stupid and along with becoming better people), he rejects the Bad Place and tries to find a way to save humanity. He later becomes one of the head designers of the new system that ensures everyone will eventually make it into the Good Place, and his final action in the series is him choosing to become a human permanently.
• Become a Real Boy: Michael's biggest desire has always been to know what it feels like to be human, and at times it's implied that this desire is so intense that Michael wishes he was a human himself. This is outright confirmed by the finale; Michael is given the opportunity to become a human, which he accepts with awe, excitement, and wonder. Eleanor even tells him, "You're going to be a real boy, Pinocchio."
• Becoming the Mask: He is a demon who decided to pose as a Good Place Architect that cares about the souls so he could witness the torture firsthand. He didn't account for Chidi truly reforming Eleanor, or for all of them to rally around him as their friend before Eleanor figured out they were in the bad place. By Season 2, Chidi kicking him out of ethics class for torturing him has some emotional impact, and Michael realizes that he truly wants to save them. In one of the greatest ironies of this trope, he actually receives full ownership and control of the Good Place — the real one, and is put in charge of reforming it.
• Being Evil Sucks: It's part of Becoming the Mask. During Season 2, Michael still has to balance his "evil" nature with having to help the humans, and enjoys torture. Past Season 2, he's still emotionally wracked from having been evil, to the point of being scared to return to the Bad Place in Season 4.
• Beleaguered Bureaucrat: Works himself into a frenzy trying to keep control of all the chaos that Eleanor accidentally causes. The majority of his efforts outright fail to help the problem, which just makes him more panicky. At the end of the first season, this is revealed to have been an act, but the second season opens with him scrambling to prevent Eleanor and her friends from figuring out his secret and ruining his real plan.
• Benevolent Boss: For a demon, he's actually quite benevolent to his subordinates as long as they're not incompetent in reboot one. After three hundred years' worth of torture and Michael getting angry at his demons over the neighborhood not working, this no longer qualifies.
• Big Bad: For Season 1 after his true motivations are revealed. This continues for a few episodes into Season 2 until his continued interactions with the humans cause him to make a Heel–Face Turn and then go on to legitimately play the Big Good role for the remainder of the series.
• Big Good: He's the designer and in charge of maintaining the neighborhood, so he initially comes across as this. Subverted, since he's actually a demon. Double Subverted after he Took a Level in Kindness in Season 2. By the midpoint of Season 3, he's the only member of the entire Celestial Bureaucracy who cares enough about humanity to do something about how horribly broken the system for judging people has become and by the penultimate Season 4 episode becomes the de facto ruler of the real Good Place.
• Bitch in Sheep's Clothing:
  • In Season 1, he was this, posing as the architect of the neighborhood and pretending to try and manage the chaos when in reality he was the one causing it.
  • After Chidi's ethics lessons took effect, he went in the opposite direction at the end of Season 2, putting on a mask of evil to protect the four humans.
• Black Comedy: A major source of this thanks to being a demon and all.
  • He has absolutely no problem with kicking a dog into the sun in Season 1, with the whole moment being entirely played for laughs when he does it. It ends up foreshadowing his true nature as a Demon of the Bad Place.
  • Even following his Heel–Face Turn, he considers killing the four humans' physical bodies as to manually prevent their souls from being immediately sent to the Bad Place. Considering he was on Earth and without his powers, it would likely have been quite a messy spectacle.
• Bloody Hilarious: In "The Trolley Problem", Michael decides to take Chidi's thought experiment, The Trolley Problem—about whether to run over one person with a trolley or five—and do it for real. Chidi gets covered in blood and gore as he runs people over. Repeatedly. "I would never make you kill real people." "Oh, well, that's reassuring, because some of the parts of the fake people flew into my mouth!"
• Blue-and-Orange Morality: While he's fascinated with humans and knows a lot about them, his immortal and demonic nature makes it difficult for him to truly understand human morality or emotions.
  • His one continued miscalculation during his hundreds of resets was not accounting for the inherent human capacity to help one another out, either for selfish or altruistic reasons. This leads to the humans inevitably banding together against him.
  • It takes a while for Chidi's ethics lessons to get through to him, and it largely clicks for him when he finally understands the terror of human mortality (and freaks out).
• Born as an Adult: When he becomes a human in the finale, he spawns into Earth already being an adult man.
• Brought Down to Normal: While on Earth in Season 3, he loses all his powers. While it's unclear if it made him mortal or if he can get hurt, he can't just fix things with the snap of a fingers anymore either.
• Buffy Speak: Resorts to this to describe concepts he's unfamiliar with, such as as 'presents' ("Opposite-tortures") and 'guilt' ("after-sad").
• Category Traitor: After allying with Eleanor and the other humans, and later coming to genuinely care for them, Michael is seen as a disgrace to other demons, as they are supposed to hate humans.
• Celibate Hero: Of the likely actually-aromantic and asexual variety. He himself says that the higher beings of the afterlife can't really discern levels of human attractiveness, and not once is shown to have any romantic or sexual interest in anyone. He becomes a real human person in the series finale. He's depicted as having an amazing life down on Earth, with numerous friends, but he still never gets into a romantic or sexual relationship with anyone, the love he spreads with others being entirely platonic.
• Character Development: He has the most drastic change in the main cast due to how truly heinous he started compared to the 4 humans. In Season 1, he's malicious demon who acts as a False Friend to the gang for the purposes of driving them crazy as their eternal punishment. Near the start of Season 2, he teams up with them, but only so they will play along with his attempt to dupe the other demons into thinking that the plan is actually working, and they won't report him to Shawn, and initially is hardly any kinder to them than he was before. But over the course of taking ethics lessons with them and working with them to hide the truth from the other demons, he starts to bond with them and genuinely care for them, to the point where, when Shawn offers him a place on the high council for the neighborhood's supposed success, he gives it up to rescue them from spending eternal torture in the real bad place. From that point on, he's a full fledged hero, determined not only to help the gang achieve salvation by any means, but strives to fix the newly discovered issue of humanity wrongfully being judged for unintended consequences of their actions.
• Character Tic:
  • He tends to take off his glasses when frustrated or overwhelmed.
  • He always wears a two button suit, and every time he sits down, he unbuttons it, then rebuttons it when he stands up. He wears the suits as perfectly as he can.
• The Chessmaster: In Season 1, he knew exactly what he was doing in order to screw with the humans' heads under pretense of being nice. In Season 2, after his reformation he rigs up a plan to fool Shawn and the rest of the demons despite having zero time to prepare, banking on his knowledge and familiarity with the demons and humans alike. And it works perfectly despite being somewhat complicated and relying on the everyone involved to do fairly specific actions. Does a much more subtle repeat in "Somewhere Else" where with about two sentences he is able to get a pre-Character Development Eleanor who has lapsed back heavily into her bad ways to fly to St. John's University to find Chidi. In Season 4, it takes him almost no effort to get Vicki to change her mind and take charge of the project.
• Complete Immortality: He was born at the very beginning of time, and retirement will consist of spending eternity being tortured after having every ounce of his body split and individually placed upon a single sun. Despite this, he'll still be alive and conscious through all that. He gives it up at the end of Season 4 when he chooses to become human, which includes one day dying on Earth then being allowed to go through the Door and end his existence whenever he's ready.
• Complexity Addiction: All of his ideas involve an intricate sequence of steps where every single moment must go according to plan over the course of eternity. Unfortunately, the universe doesn't work like that and he's frequently forced to do damage control.
• Consistent Clothing Style: Michael's suits are in line with the office wear of the other afterlife employees, but he's the only one who always wears bowties.
• Consummate Liar: Michael is a fantastic liar and manipulator, able to lie and fake emotion more or less flawlessly.
• Control Freak: His Fatal Flaw. In defiance of Shawn pointing out that humans are too unpredictable, he controls every factor of the fake Neighborhood. Unfortunately, while manufactured chaos is fine, actual surprises derail him. His attempting to keep the four humans together in Season 3 ends up condemning them to the Bad Place by default, which nearly drives him to commit suicide by turning himself in to the Judge.
• The Dandy: His wardrobe consists almost entirely of colorful suits. Onbe might assume that this is just part of his persona, but he appears genuinely insulted when Vicky claims he can't pull off his bow ties.
• Deadpan Snarker: Under his mask of polite geniality, Michael can be extremely snide, especially pre-Character Development. This often results in Snark-to-Snark Combat with Eleanor even after they become Fire-Forged Friends. For instance, he and Eleanor have the following conversation in "Team Cockroach" regarding Chidi having always helped Eleanor in every reboot:
  Michael: That pesky little nerd stuck with you and always helped you overcome your biggest problem.
  Eleanor: Assuming that's my selfishness?
  Michael: It's that you never found a haircut that framed your face properly. [turns and glares at her] Yes, your selfishness.
• Defeat Means Friendship: He starts to side with the humans once it becomes abundantly clear that his pseudo-Good Place neighborhood experiment was a complete and utter failure.
• Demon of Human Origin: Inverted. In the series finale, Michael chooses to become human, making him the first and only demon/immortal being to do so.
• De-power: Michael chooses to become human, which subsequently means he loses all of his demon powers. He is also warned that, once he becomes human, he won't be given any sort of special treatment, and will go through everything other humans do, including dying on Earth and then being completely at the mercy of the afterlife system. However, it turns out that the vulnerability and uncertainty of true mortality is exactly what Michael wants.
• Determined Defeatist: He realized halfway through that he was never going to make his plan of having four people torturing each other in a psuedo-Good Place work, yet he kept trying literally hundreds of more times mainly because he didn't know what else to do.
• Didn't See That Coming: What ultimately threw a wrench in his initial plan for his experiment of an 'innovative' Bad Place is that he didn't expect that Chidi could succeed in actually getting Eleanor to change for the better.
• Didn't Think This Through:
  • Michael should have really expected better than to let four humans torture each other than letting the demons do it, for which Shawn gloats to him, as even Shawn admits they could never get humans to torture each other willingly in all these eons.
  • He also should have expected Eleanor's The Paranoiac nature to eventually see through the illusions of "The Good Place", and bring someone other than Chidi in his experiment as a human.
• Dimension Lord: Of the neighborhood, Michael built it and can alter it as he sees fit. Such as creating thousands of new frozen yogurt flavors, several of which embody concepts (like "mother's love" and "full cell phone battery"). He definitely has his limits, as seen when things start to spiral out of control. He also has the ability to wipe memories and reboot the neighborhood.
• The Dragon: He served as this to Shawn, until he pulls a Heel–Face Turn and works against him. Really, though, instead of being Shawn's go-to big guy, Michael just happens to be one of a number of underlings working on Bad Place Neighborhoods. He doesn't have any special power or status in the Bad Place hierarchy beyond that, and only serves as The Dragon thanks to his role as the initial Big Bad to Team Cockroach.
• Drowning My Sorrows: At attempt eighty-something he has become a mess and fell in a drunken rambling about his failed previous attempts... right in front of a mind-wiped Eleanor.
• Eldritch Abomination: Par for the course for a demon: the humanlike Michael is just a skin suit he's wearing. His true form is that of a six-thousand foot tall fire squid that smells terrible, has a long neck, is covered in teeth, and constantly oozes juice. He considers this form to be so disgusting that he'd rather turn himself into a pile of goo than let his friends see him like that.
• Even Evil Has Loved Ones: In Season 2, he realizes that he can't go through with destroying Janet, as he genuinely considers her his friend. Later in Season 2, he actually breaks down when confessing that he wasn't sure if the humans were safe or not. By Season 3 he openly states that the four humans are the only thing he cares about in the entire universe.
• Even Evil Has Standards: It's implied in Season 3 that he was fine with being a demon and torturing people because that's how the universe dispenses justice in the afterlife to people who deserve it. The other humans admit that he may have a point when they learn that their flaws landed them in the Bad Place. Post Heel–Face Turn, he's utterly horrified and outraged upon finding out that no one has entered the Good Place for 521 years due to the system being rigged unfairly, and it's implied that if he had learned this while evil it would have broken him.
• Everyone Has Standards: He's a very nice dude, but even he has limits. Though the below two examples were part of his act.
  • He's very annoyed by Tahani's condescending attitude and will take pot shots when it gets too much.
  • Chidi's dithering gets on his nerves very quickly, to the point he openly chews him out of it.
  • Following his Heel–Face Turn, he stops a jealous Eleanor from cutting up Patricia's dolls due to her suspicion that Donna hid money in them.
• Evil All Along: It turns out he's been the chessmaster of the main cast's personal hell since the start, engineering many of the crazy happenstances as torture for Eleanor, Jason, Chidi and Tahani as entertainment for the cosmic entities running the Bad Place they're actually in.
• Evil Cannot Comprehend Good: The one flaw in his master plan to torment the main four was that he never imagined that Eleanor could learn to be good. Her confession threw a wrench in the whole setup. Later in Season 2, he starts taking ethics lessons from Chidi, which is a struggle because, well, as a demon he's not naturally good; when Chidi has him read Les Misérables he concludes everyone in the book deserves to go to the Bad Place. Later averted as he goes through Character Development and becomes a surprisingly moral person.
• Evil Has a Bad Sense of Humor: In "The Trolley Problem", he thinks it's funny to force Chidi into Sadistic Choices where multiple people are in mortal danger and he has to choose to let at least one die in order to save the others.
• Evil Laugh: Lets out a horryifying, unnervingly creepy laugh accompanied by a vicious Slasher Smile after Eleanor figures out his game in "Michael's Gambit".
• Ex-Big Bad: Although the audience didn't know it, throughout season one he was the primary villain who was torturing the humans. After his neighborhood is a failure, he rejects the Bad Place and joins the humans' side to save humanity.
• Expy: During the first season, he's one for the Valet from No Exit, being a humble, unassuming afterlife employee administering a torture chamber. After the events of the first season, though, he goes through Character Development and quickly evolves beyond his similarities to the Valet.
• Failure Is the Only Option: In "Dance Dance Resolution", the heroes kept figuring out that they were actually in the Bad Place (minus that one time when Michael accidentally sat on the reset button and the two times he blurted it out in a fit of anger or drunkenness).
• Fallen Angel: As of Season 3, he appears to be turning into an inversion. He goes from a demon that tortures humans to a supernatural being that saved the lives of four humans so they get another shot at ascending to the Good Place, and then descended to Earth to help save their souls himself. When that falls through, he instead helps those humans save the souls of other people instead. He could be seen as rising from Hell, behaving increasingly less like a demon and more like an actual angel.
• Fatal Flaw: His perfectionist nature — he doesn't deal well with unexpected events in his plans. This continues even after his Heel–Face Turn.
• A Form You Are Comfortable With: Michael absolutely refuses to take his skin suit off under any circumstance because he's worried his natural demon form would change the way his human friends look at him.
• For the Evulz: Why he decided to "innovate" with a true Ironic Hell; he was getting really bored with the typical Fire and Brimstone Hell and wanted to try something new and more personal.
• Four Eyes, Zero Soul: He's a demon who wears thick black glasses. Eventually Subverted as it's slowly revealed Michael has more of a soul and is willing to make up for the Bad Place's mistakes than any of his fellow demons.
• The Friend Nobody Likes:
  • After a few hundred reboots, all his fellow demons in the fake Good Place have gotten pretty sick of his shit. (The other demons in the rest of the Bad Place don't know about the reboots yet, though, so they like him fine.) By the end of the second episode of the second season, they're threatening mutiny.
  • When he first joins Team Cockroach, they don't like or trust him at all, and only ally with him because there are no other options. They start off keeping him at arm's length, and are quick to assume the worst of him (which, to be fair, is reasonable considering he tortured them for three hundred years). This slowly changes, however, and by the end of the season he's part of the family.
• The Gadfly: Many of his goofy conversations and Oblivious Guilt Slinging with the residents seem, in retrospect, to be his subtle way of mocking and harassing them.
• Good Feels Good: Like Eleanor, he comes to this realization, genuinely enjoying human life and trying to take care of them.
• Grumpy Old Man: He dislikes his "millennial" co-workers (they've only been torturing people for a thousand years) claiming they have no work ethic.
• Guile Hero: Post Heel–Face Turn, Michael uses his intellect and subtle manipulations to save the four humans, and later, humanity as a whole. When Shawn and company come to the neighborhood to take the heroes for torture, Michael feigns allegiance to his fellow demons while dropping subtle hints in his roast so the heroes can evade capture. To seal the deal, he whispers selectively to Janet to stoke Vicki's paranoia, framing her for the humans' escape. On Earth, he appears to the other heroes as a Mentor Archetype, nudging each of them towards working together.
• The Heavy: Prior to his Heel–Face Turn, Michael is the one villain that drove the plot the most and the biggest obstacle Team Cockroach had to face, even if Michael was working for Shawn at the time. In fact, had Michael not put these four into his pseudo-good place, they would have never received their Character Development and there would be no story to tell.
• Heel–Face Turn: After the humans keep figuring out that they're actually in the Bad Place, he teams up with them in the hopes of covering his ass. The influence of Eleanor and Chidi then sows the first seeds of genuine morality, and he finds himself growing genuinely fond of Janet and his former victims.
• Heel Realization: He gets one in Season 2 when Janet starts glitching, and he thinks it's because he lied to her about this being the Good Place and kidnapping her from a Good Place warehouse. Even when they determine it's because of her heartbreak overseeing Jason and Tahani together, Michael still feels guilty since he erased Janet's marriage to Jason and is faced with a Sadistic Choice of killing her to save the neighborhood.
• Hero Antagonist: His investigation into what's causing the disruptions in the Good Place leads straight to Eleanor. But then he decides to fight to keep her in. Ultimately subverted. He isn't and never was a hero until seasons two through four where he goes against the system to save the humans from damnation.
• Heroic Sacrifice: Sacrifices himself in Season 2, letting himself be captured by Shawn to let Eleanor get to the Judge.
• Hidden Villain: Again, that first season finale reveal. It's not just a surprise that he's the bad guy, it's a surprise that this show even has bad guys!
• Hollywood Mid-Life Crisis: Parodied. In "Existential Crisis", Michael developed a fast one after Eleanor told him to ignore his existential dread by pretending to be fine. It even included a Mid-Life Crisis Car, getting a tattoo ("It's Chinese for 'Japan'!") and an earring, and Janet posing as his Trophy Wife.
• Hope Bringer: It's revealed the Good Place Committee sees him like this. Michael was the first being to challenge the established system and actually make concrete changes, with the help of his friends. They not only allow him to visit the Good Place but also agree to make him the owner and resign, because they trust he can fix eternal mediocrity.
• Humanity Is Infectious: After he teams up with the human cast, Eleanor remarks several times upon his increasingly human-like attitude and behavior. Eventually, they collectively name him an "honorary human", much to his delight. In the series finale, he actually becomes a human for real. He begs the team not to make him show them his true form, because it would make them see him differently.
• Humanity Is Special: Gives this viewpoint to both Gen and Shawn as they question his betrayal from the Bad Place. Sure enough, the four humans eventually redeem the afterlife enough to open the Good Place to humans afer hundreds of years, and he becomes human so as to gain a firsthand perspective of a human life.
• Humiliation Conga: Is subjected to one in "Dance Dance Resolution", when the humans are able to realize they're in the Bad Place... for over 800 attempts.
  Michael: Jason figured it out? Jason? Oh, this is a real low point. Yeah, this one hurts. Ow.
• Human Outside, Alien Inside: His human appearance is not his real form. It's also been mentioned that he doesn't have any organs, nor does he need to perform any biological functions like defecating. In season four, it's revealed that his true form is a horrific 6,000-foot-tall fire squid.

I to W

• I Am a Monster: He struggles with this both emotionally and physically regarding his demon status after his Heel–Face Turn. He's horrified that he spent eons gleefully torturing people, and avoids showing Eleanor footage showing how cruel he was. Later, he refuses to take off his skin suit, because he believes that if the humans were to see his natural form as a giant fire squid, they'd be so disgusted they wouldn't want to be friends with him anymore.
• I Hate Past Me: After he fully redeems himself, Michael becomes very ashamed of how cruel he used to be, and dislikes himself or anyone else being reminded of it. When he has to return to the Bad Place to save Janet in season four, it's an extremely painful experience for him as he's basically forced to remember the evil demon he once was.
  Janet: That must have been hard for you. To go back there.
  Michael: It was. I don't like thinking about...who I used to be.
• Immortals Fear Death: Chidi tries to give him perspective on mortality by asking him to seriously think about what it would be like to die, or "be retired". He utterly freaks out at the notion, developing a full-blown existential crisis.
• Ineffectual Sympathetic Villain: Especially after the first time he has to reset everything. Shawn has absolutely zero faith in him, all the other demons at his command question his plans (especially Vicky), and he doesn't even make it one day before Jason blows his cover and Eleanor realizes they aren't in the Good Place. He's much more competent when he allies with the humans.
• Internalized Categorism: After he fully redeems himself and rejects the Bad Place, Michael struggles with the feeling that, because he's a demon, he is automatically an evil, disgusting creature and always will be. In the episode, "Employee of the Bearimy", Vicky guilts him by repeating these exact same insecurities and telling him he'll always belong to the Bad Place, and Michael is visibly distressed by her speech.
• Intrigued by Humanity: In Season 1, he says he is endlessly fascinated with human culture, which is why he went against the rule that architects are not supposed to live in the neighborhoods they design. He also kept a collection of mundane human objects (a tape dispenser, a slingshot, wax lips, a cheese grater, an eraser and a paper football.) Surprisingly, this turns out not to have been part of the act; he admits in Season 2 that he's always wanted to know what it's like to be human, and he geeks out over activities such as riding a bus and buying a gumball while visiting Earth during Season 3. In the series finale, he finally gets to experience humanity firsthand by becoming a human himself, and he's clearly having the time of his life getting to be an ordinary human.
• Irony: Early on in Season 2, Michael continually reboots the Neighborhood over and over again so he can find a way to effectively torture the humans without being found out... but in the end, this ends up really being torture for him. When Vicky threatens mutiny, he's forced to team up with the humans just to break out of what would otherwise be an eternal stalemate.
• Jerkass Has a Point:
  • After his Heel–Face Turn, he gets Eleanor to get closure with her mother by pointing out that Donna has changed. Saying that to any victim of emotional abuse is dick behavior, and Eleanor also had a point that her mother didn't change for her and treated her like an afterthought, but Michael was right that destroying Donna wouldn't make Eleanor happier. Eleanor eventually realizes this after confronting her mother.
  • He gets really upset with the Accountants and the Good Place Committee for letting a broken system operate for millennia. Michael is very right, as the Judge eventually concedes after spending thirty years on Earth.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: He evolves into this over the course of Season 2. He's still got an edge to him, and is essentially the Token Evil Teammate, but he truly cares for the rest of Team Cockroach, and shows a lot more vulnerability and moments of kindness. And compared to the rest of the Bad Place, he's practically a saint.
• Karmic Jackpot: He eventually receives one by accidentally signing a contract that makes him the head of the real Good Place. It's not what the Good Place Committee intended as a jackpot — they were banging their heads against the wall about Paradise not being fulfilling while looking for an exit — but it means that Michael has eternal paradise and the means to give humans the afterlife they deserve. The best part? He gets to spend it with the four humans and Janet that changed him for the better.
• Kick the Dog: Michael literally kicks a dog into the sun, thinking it was A Glitch in the Matrix. Moments later, a woman asks if anyone's seen her dog. Michael brings it back good as new, thoughtlessly telling her owner that it's basically just a simulation of a dog and doesn't really feel pain, or love. Of course, once you know who he really is...
• Limited Wardrobe: Is always seen in a suit with a bowtie, though with very saturated colors that makes him slightly unnerving next to his big smile.
• Living Emotional Crutch: Team Cockroach as a whole, including Janet (so much as she can be called "living"), functions as this for him. They're the only true friends he's ever had, and the only things he cares about in the universe. By the end of Season 2, he is absolutely dedicated to getting them into the Good Place for real — and perfectly willing to risk the wrath of Gen to do so.
• Manipulative Bastard: Michael has proven to be adept to manipulating people into dancing to his tune. This is shown when tricks a group go people into thinking that they are in "The Good Place" so that they would psychologically torture each other and is even capable of tricking his own kind into doing what he wants.
• Meaningful Name:
  • It's appropriate a higher being in charge of a place that appears to essentially be Heaven shares his name with the Christian Archangel.
    • Becomes an Ironic Name following The Reveal. His "Heaven" is nothing of the kind and he's closer to The Devil than any archangel.
    • Eventually Double Subverted as he ends up in charge of the actual Good Place due to his unique outlook of the afterlife and humanity.
  • Interestingly, the name Michael is a famous rhetorical question in Hebrew, "Who is like God?" Which fits doubly as Michael takes a different subversion of a God-Like role in each season; up until the end, where he's the one asking these sorts of questions himself.
  • Michael is also the name of the showrunner, Michael Schur, which is essentially the character Michael's role within the show. This takes on greater resonance with The Reveal, which shows that both Michael the character and Michael the show runner have tricked their respective audiences about the true nature of The Good Place.
  • In the series finale, he becomes a real man and takes the surname Realman.
• Minion with an F in Evil: Downplayed. On one hand, back when he was still an evil demon, he did enjoy torturing humans and messing with the main four just for kicks. However, deep down, he has always been legitimately enthralled by humanity in ways that no other demon is, and it was that enthrallment that caused him to create the fake Good Place and eventually reject the Bad Place. His personality is also pretty different from his co-workers, and he seems aghast that they don't respect his seniority or authority:
  Vicky: Yeah but, I don't think you can pull it off. [smirks] You can't even pull off those bow ties.
  Michael: [touches bow tie, visibly offended] That was very mean. But I'm gonna move past that, in the name of unit cohesion.
• Mundane Object Amazement: Michael loves humans so much that he is delighted by incredibly ordinary human things such as paper clips and places that were once Pizza Huts and Taco Bells.
• My God, What Have I Done?: It's implied in Seasons 2 and 3, and confirmed in Season 4, that he thought being a demon and torturing people was fine because it was part of the moral balance of the universe. After all, he's in the Bad Place, and the system would only send them people who deserved eternal torment, riiiight? He begins to make a Heel–Face Turn when he realizes humans are truly capable of changing for the better, even in death. When he realizes the system is so forked-up, no one's been considered "good" for over five hundred years, the realization of how many good and decent people have been unjustly tortured hits him like a freight train.
• My Species Doth Protest Too Much: No other demon (or any immortal being, for that matter) has ever been fascinated with humans the way Michael is. The entire reason he created the fake Good Place to begin with was because he wasn't just satisfied designing a bunch of tortures and moving on. He wanted to be there with the humans, to closely observe and interact with them. Even after he rejects the Bad Place and becomes the only demon fighting to save humanity, his adoration and enthrallment of humans still remains unique. Eleanor even helps convince the Judge to allow Michael to become a human himself by telling her that no other immortal being will ever want to do it.
• Nerves of Steel: He's scared of Shawn, and for a rational reason. Even so, whenever Shawn confronts him for being a traitor, Michael manages to remain calm and faces his imminent doom with dignity.
• Nice Guy: His initial persona as an angelic emissary trying to make the afterlife perfect. Turns out he's actually Affably Evil. Even after he's revealed to be a demon working for the Bad Place, he still manages to come across as fairly likable. He gradually becomes a genuine example of this as the show goes on.
• Nice Job Fixing It, Villain: As a new and original form of torture, he brings together four souls whose personalities are so perfectly out of sync that they'll torment each other for all eternity...and they proceed to make each other into better people.
• Nice to the Waiter: He tries to put on this act with Janet in reboot one, but the reality is that while he's nice to his subordinates, he will lash out at them when things go wrong and was using Janet to simply Maintain the Lie. The first sign of Chidi's ethic lessons working was when he was faced with the possibility of having to marbelize Janet and "kill her", and he apologized on realizing that he couldn't do it and he hurt her by erasing her memory of marrying Jason. It takes until season 4 for him to treat all Janets and demons kindly and like people.
• Nobody Poops: He doesn't need to excrete any waste and often forgets that its something that humans have to do, such as when he forgets to include bathrooms in an architectural blueprint he was working on.
• No Social Skills: No human social skills, at any rate. Initially, Michael is perfectly charming, if a bit bumbling and insensitive, when dealing with humans — but that's an act. If he's not torturing them, lying to them, or lying to them in order to torture them, he absolutely flounders. He gets somewhat better with Team Cockroach, though he still thinks it's appropriate to propose killing them all as a solution to a problem.
• Normal Fish in a Tiny Pond: Michael is first introduced as a cosmic being who is in charge of the neighborhood, but it's eventually revealed that he's actually an average (if not low) ranking demon. He had worked for the Bad Place since the beginning of time, but the neighborhood was his first-ever solo project. For eons, Michael was just an apprentice, performing whatever tortures he was assigned.
• "Not So Different" Remark: From Eleanor. She correctly deduces his behavior is him lashing out because he's insecure.
• No, You: Is a true master of this classic comeback, finding so many variations that he never has to repeat one.
• Old Shame: His past time working for the Bad Place. He's horrified by the fact that he spent eons working for the realm devoted to torturing humans, and hates his old self of an evil demon.
• Our Angels Are Different:
  • A Good Place architect seems to be, more or less, an equivalent of an angel, and he certainly seems to style his role of one as such, putting on a gentle, naive facade.
  • Come Season 3, however, and you have him rescuing humans from death to give them a second chance at life, constantly intervening in their lives to try and nudge them toward the good path, and then helping said humans help as many people as possible cross into the Good Place: He's essentially an angel in everything but name.
• Parental Substitute:
  • In Season 3 he becomes a father figure to Eleanor, which is lampshaded. Averted when she responds that he's "not even in the ballpark." This makes sense as she was more of a mentor figure to him in Season Two and their relationship is more like siblings. In the extended version of the series finale, he calls her 'sister'.
  • Janet even refers to him as her "dad", with Gen as her "mom". She immediately changes her mind when she says it out loud.
• The Perfectionist: Michael is such a perfectionist that the very thought of something messing up the perfect afterlife that he created drives him crazy. An attitude later validated after Shawn threatens Michael with "retirement" or similar punishment if the second attempt at his innovative torture town fails. And after he gets in way too deep with his 800 subsequent tries. When he recreates his Neighborhood for the experiment under Gen's guidelines, his repeat failures topped with the added pressure of the fate of humanity resting on the Neighborhood improving the humans in his care leaves him collapsing in a panic-attack the moment the experiment begins, forcing Eleanor to step in and act as "architect."
• Punch-Clock Villain: He is only torturing humans because it's in his very nature to, and as we see in Season 2, he genuinely believes humans are bad enough to end up in the Bad Place, no matter what the reason. Chidi's lessons help him grow out of this mindset, as he states to Gen that it was his biggest flaw, and asserts proudly that if the four humans can change and grow to become better humans, so can humanity, and the system torturing billions of humans is wrong.
• Reformed, but Not Tamed: Played straight in season two. He's siding with the humans, but only because he has no other option. He remains quite rude (along with other personality traits from Bad Place culture) and has trouble remembering not to torture humans.
  • He becomes a downplayed version of this post-season three, which is after his full Heel–Face Turn. While he now genuinely wants to help the humans, to the point of being ashamed over his past as a demon, he isn't exactly the goody-two shoes that the Good Place committee is later shown to be - namely, he's willing to break the rules, lie to bystanders, and cheat in order to save humanity.
• Refreshingly Normal Life-Choice: Invoked. The final path of Michael's eons long existence is spending it as a normal human doing normal human things. Janet even intentionally gives Michael enough money on Earth so he can live comfortably but not extravagantly. He's also not going to get any special treatment regarding the afterlife system, and will go through everything in it the same way every human does. But the mundanity of his existence now is exactly what Michael wants; Michael's always loved the simple things about humanity, and he's clearly having a blast finally getting to experience them firsthand.
• Restored My Faith in Humanity: Michael has always been fascinated with humans, but his outlook on them used to be incredibly cynical. It was only when he truly began to interact with humans in his neighborhood that he realized that they were capable of improvement.
• Running Gag: He has a tendency to invent slang terms that already exist, like "epic fail" and "chillax".
• Screw the Rules, I'm Doing What's Right!:
  • In Season 1, he tells Trevor to fork off — even if Eleanor doesn't belong in the Good Place, she's his friend and he's keeping her. Subverted, as this was part of the act.
  • Later played straight, when he starts working with Team Cockroach to try and get them into the real Good Place. At first it's to save his own hide, since he knows Shawn will not be happy if he finds out about the resets, but over time, he grows to care for the group. By the midpoint of Season 2, he's fully changed sides and is now actively working against his boss to help the humans.
  • In total defiance of Gen, he pops down to Earth multiple times to guide Team Cockroach into becoming better people. To say the results vary is a massive understatement.
• Seers: Averted. Despite his numerous other supernatural abilities, Michael specifically mentions in one episode that he can't see into the future.
• Sharp-Dressed Man: Like most of the other male Bad Place demons, he always wears a suit and tie/bowtie. Upon becoming a human, he switches to a shirt and jeans.
• Shipper on Deck: He gradually comes to root for Chidi/Eleanor.
• Spanner in the Works: Michael ends up becoming the Accidental Hero of the whole series by simply doing his job. He proposes a new neighborhood in the hopes of impressing Shawn and revolutionizing torture, only to learn that humans are capable of change after death and keep improving no matter what he does to gaslight them. Then he learns that the system is so forked up that no one can enter the Good Place, exposing that Shawn was enabling a broken system. Cue Michael facing bureaucrat after bureaucrat in the divine hierarchy, before he and the Soul Squad convince Gen that something needs to change.
• Stylistic Suck: In "Leap to Faith", his comedy roast of the main cast prior to shipping them off to the real Bad Place is rather weak, with only a few decent jokes in there. The demons present eat it up however, because they mostly find the humans' misery hilarious. It turns out that it was all for show, and most of the bad jokes or pot shots were hidden messages to the humans detailing an escape plan to them.
• Surrounded by Idiots:
  • Most of the demons he has to work with are morons, Attention Whores, completely impossible to work with, or some combo thereof. The audience may find themselves feeling a bit bad for Michael!
  • He initially is plagued with this with everyone else in the afterlife regarding the issue that no one has made it to the Good Place in 521 years. The prideful accountants refuse to accept the possibility that there is an issue with their "perfect" system and refuse to look into it. The Good Place Committee is willing to help, but insist on taking over 1400 years to prepare their investigation, while thousands of people will continue to wrongfully be sent to The Bad Place (might be downplayed if the Committee was referring to Jeremy Bearimy, but still that shows a massive amount of inaction for a long time). Even when revealing the cause of the problem to Gen, specifically that the system unfairly judges people for the multiple adverse external connections to their actions, like buying a tomato grown with pesticides and picked by exploited unpaid labor, Gen initially refuses to take any responsibility on her own end, and says it's humanity's own fault for failing to consider the potential consequences of their actions beforehand, and only manages to see Michael's viewpoint as she goes down to Earth to live a human life and see what Michael is talking about.
• Tentacled Terror: In "Tinker Tailor Demon Spy" he reveals that his true form is apparently a six-thousand-foot-tall squid, on fire, with teeth everywhere.
• Time Abyss: He appears to be literally as old as time itself, given that he lists his birthdate as "0". He also mentions that he's "been around for some time... all of it, actually."
• Token Good Teammate: Of the Bad Place demons, as he's the only demon fighting to save humanity.
  • Even when he still worked for the Bad Place, he was a downplayed version of this. He was certainly very cruel and did enjoy torturing people, but Michael's fascination with humanity was never part of the ruse - in fact, it was the very reason he created the fake Good Place to begin with. Michael has always loved humans, even when he was still an evil demon, and, deep down, his motive behind the entire neighborhood concept was because he was genuinely enthralled by humanity. Interacting with humans in a semi-normal manner and playing with fun human stuff like karaoke and paper clips was the entire point for him, and the neighborhood was his only socially acceptable way of doing that.
• Token Evil Teammate: Throughout the first half of Season 2, when the main four only work with him because they have literally no other choice and still don't trust him.
• Took a Level in Kindness: Several times over the series. In Season 2, he initially only sides with the four main characters out of convenience, due to being blackmailed by Vicky, but after a while he starts to truly care about them. For some time his kindness extends only to those four humans (and he still mocks their human limitations sometimes), but by the time of Season 3 he's started to expand his kindness to more people, even people he hasn't met. By Season 4 he's become genuinely altruistic.
• Trans Nature: The further along the series progresses, the less and less Michael wants to be perceived and regarded as a demon. Namely because demons are, by their very nature, supposed to be evil and cruel creatures that humans are disgusted and horrified by - which is the exact opposite of what Michael wants to be. In the series finale, he officially abandons demonhood for good, choosing to become a human permanently.
• Troll: Many of the tortures he inflicts seem to be inspired purely by a desire to mess with people.
• Unreliable Expositor: The audience has been trusting him as completely as the cast, and everything we think we know about this world and how it works comes from him. As the "architect" of this "neighborhood," it means even things we saw that he didn't tell us were arranged by him as part of his experiment. Even more than this being the Bad Place, knowing that Michael is the villain changes absolutely everything. Almost everything you ever thought you knew about the show's universe - big or small, comedic or serious - was said or arranged by him to torture just these four! Now watch it all again with that in mind.
• Villain Has a Point: All the humans concede that he was right about why Tahani and Chidi ended up in the Bad Place. And while torturing Chidi during "The Trolley Problem," he makes the point that it's not so easy to sacrifice a life when you're actually at the controls and have to make the choice.
• Walking Spoiler: Given that his entire Character Arc, motivations, and true personality revolve around it, it's basically impossible to talk about him without revealing he's actually a demon from the Bad Place who designed the neighborhood to torture the main four.
• We Named the Monkey "Jack": Upon becoming human, he names his dog after Jason.
• What Is This Feeling?: Has difficulty understanding and expressing the odd, human emotions he's starting to feel, such as concern for others, or guilt.
• White Hair, Black Heart: He's a demon with white hair. Subverted as he learns more about ethics and becomes a somewhat more moral individual.
• Who Wants to Live Forever?: After spending thousands of Bearimies in the Good Place, Michael reaches the same point that all humans in the Good Place eventually do; he's done everything he's wanted to do, yet he still has infinity left to go. However, while the Door has since been invented to solve this problem, it doesn't work for Michael because he's an immortal being. The solution to this is to allow Michael to become an actual human himself, meaning that he will one day die and (after passing his afterlife tests) be able to walk through the Door and end his existence whenever he's ready.

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"With all the joy in my heart, and all the wisdom in the universe — take it sleazy."

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