History YMMV / TheGoodPlace

* SpiritualSuccessor: The show is basically an expansion of the famed ''[[Series/TheTwilightZone1959 Twilight Zone]]'' episode [[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS1E28ANicePlaceToVisit "A Nice Place To Visit"]].

* WhatDoYouMeanItsNotForKids: Amazon categorizes the show under Kids and Family, right next to shows like [=SpongeBob SquarePants=] and Vampirina. Just because it's about angels in heaven doesn't make it a family show, as there are several jokes about death, drugs, and sex in it. And in the end, they aren't even in heaven at all, so if they didn't get the message before...

* IdiotPlot:
** Deliberately invoked from the pilot to the beginning of Season 2, and bordering on the point of {{Deconstruction}}. It at first seems that a phenomenal cosmic screw-up occurred where Eleanor, a self-serving {{Jerkass}}, ends up in The Good Place, which is reserved for the most virtuous humans, and yet again when Jianyu is revealed to be a petty crook and amateur DJ named Jason Mendoza. Then it becomes an idiot plot of a different kind when it's revealed everyone is in The Bad Place, and Michael underestimated humans' capacity to change and improve each other. He built this Bad Place assuming that humans are static beings, and is grossly annoyed to find out that no matter what he does, Team Cockroach changes for the better. It forces him to grow into a NobleDemon, question why decent but flawed humans have little chance to improve their moral character, and [[spoiler:realize that the system of morality that governs who goes to the Good Place or the Bad Place is arbitrary and outdated, with few in the celestial bureaucracy willing to make significant changes]].
** Played straight in "A Chip Driver Mystery." [[spoiler:Eleanor never tells Brent that his book will lose him points and keep him from getting into the Best Place, which she knows will almost certainly lead him to apologize to Simone and Tahani and cancel all his promotional events (although, granted, that may have been undercut by the impure motivation of moral dessert).]]
** Really, the entire first half of Season 4 qualifies for this trope, since the entire storyline requires that none of the [[spoiler:new]] humans question why [[spoiler:John and Brent are in The Good Place when they were obviously terrible people on Earth.]]
** Also in Season 4, when the question of [[spoiler:if Michael is really Michael or not, even though they know the swap would have had to have happen relatively recently no one attempts to just ask Michael to tell them something only he and someone from the group would know.]]

* SugarWiki/AwesomeMusic: Complimenting the show's theme song may seem like an odd thing to do considering it's eight seconds long, but it really does deserve the praise. It's this jingle that, at first, sounds pleasant and idyllic, yet simultaneously has this weird, almost unexplainable sense of dread sprinkled in it. It was the perfect representation of the show, even before the season one finale PlotTwist.

** Likewise, Tahani's parents crossed it by pitting their two daughters against each other and fostering inferiority complexes in them both. [[spoiler:They never get redeemed, and Kamilah takes a while to admit their parents were "completely wankers" in her words]].
** The demons in the Bad Place are {{Punch Clock Villain}}s who engage in torture in pain because it's what they do. Trevor for his part has numerous JerkassHasAPoint moments, which Eleanor acknowledges, and the demons are friends with each other. [[spoiler:Shawn then hints, and Michael confirms with horror, that the accounting system is so forked up that no human being can truly go to the Good Place due to all the technicalities that don't allow for grey area. Shawn knew this whole time that the system was flawed and gleefully enabled it. Worse, he knew the whole time that the Soul Squad would die eventually and return to him, but he decided to speed up the process to get revenge on Michael]].

** Judge Gen crosses it when, [[spoiler:after the humans prove that the point system is flawed and people can improve in the afterlife, she decides to reboot earth which would erase all humans, living and dead, from existence, and when the army of Janets teleport the reboot device away and hide it in one of their voids, she coldly declares that she will marbleize each and every one of them]].

** A particularly subtle example from the prop department, who gave Tahani's ethics homework a typically name-dropping title: "Moral particularism: And other things I learned from Claire Danes' father-in-law." Creator/ClaireDanes' father-in-law (the father of Hugh Dancy) is Professor Jonathan Dancy, one of the major proponents of moral particularism.

** Michael's desire to be a human, coupled with feeling like his current biological status does not suit him and feeling ashamed over his natural physical form, has been argued as a possible [[https://www.themarysue.com/michael-good-place-trans-allegory/ transgender metaphor.]]

* AuthorsSavingThrow: It was a common fan complaint that the first two seasons both ended with [[spoiler:the humans forgetting everything that happened,]] as it left many viewers feeling like the season's journey barely even mattered. This may influenced season four, in which a point is made of not only showcasing each of the humans [[spoiler: regaining all their afterlife memories, including the original timeline with the over 800 reboots,]] but the entire concept of [[spoiler:multiple reboots inspires the new afterlife system.]]

* TheCuckoolanderWasRight:
** Jason's examples are surprisingly prescient and relevant, even if they seem like inane, meandering stories.
*** In the first iteration, he suggested that the Good Place have been a game show, or an alien zoo. While he wasn't correct, he wasn't entirely wrong either. [[spoiler:The Neighbourhood was an experiment in psychological torture, and Jason, Tahani, Chidi, and Eleanor are the only actually humans there]].
** Jason's example of preventing the breakup of his dance crew, because Donkey Doug's jawbone-pierced, alligator-dealing girlfriend wanted to move to Sarasota, by hiding stolen boogie boards in her garage and framing her for the theft, was a surprisingly applicable example of the utilitarian dilemma.
** Jason's story about Donkey Doug splitting off starting his own dance crew, and preventing it by coming together and slashing the other crew's car tyres, was surprisingly relevant to [[spoiler:Michael's decision to join the cockroach crew, and betray the Bad Place]].

** T'Hania, a "mirror centaur" who takes on Tahani's appearance and an UpToEleven version of her personality.

** In Season 4, Simone is the first to call out Brent for his racist and sexist behavior, complaining about how she is asked to put up with it as an entitled white guy complains about everybody being "PC". [[spoiler:Years later, her actress Creator/KirbyHowellBaptiste would be scrutinized for being picked to play Death of the Endless on ''Series/TheSandman2022'' by gatekeepers of the original comics [[RaceLift because of her race]], claiming that picked because of PoliticalOvercorrectness]].

** Played straight in "A Chip Driver Mystery." [[spoiler:Eleanor never tells Brent that his book will lose him points and keep him from getting into the Best Place, which she knows will almost certainly lead him to apologize to Simone and Tahani and cancel all his promotional events.]]

* {{Fanon}}: You're more likely to find people who believe that Chidi is suffering from mental illness than not. (The most common guesses -- and bear in mind that these aren't mutually exclusive -- are Generalized Anxiety Disorder, Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, and Autism Spectrum Disorder.) This was one of the most contentious points among viewers, with many asking why a man would be sent to Hell for being mentally ill. However, the later seasons [[AuthorsSavingThrow settled these complaints by confirming]] that, at the very least, the system was ''always'' broken and never fair.

** Michael's desire to be a human has been argued as a possible [[https://www.themarysue.com/michael-good-place-trans-allegory/ transgender metaphor.]]

* UnfortunateImplications: As Spencer Kornhaber of ''The Atlantic'' [[https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2020/02/good-places-finale-made-heaven-look-hopeless/606001/ put it]], the Final Door can easily be read as a parallel for suicide, citing how some Twitter users felt that the finale validated their suicidal feelings.

* MagnificentBastard: [[Characters/TheGoodPlaceMichael Michael]] is a deceitful yet [[AffablyEvil affable]] demon who arranges for a group of souls to psychologically torture each other in the supposed Good Place. After the group figures out Michael's ploy, Michael erases their minds several times over before joining forces with them to scheme against [[SmugSnake Vicky]] after she blackmails him into relinquishing his power. Michael manipulates his demon brethren into thinking that the group has escaped while [[FrameUp framing]] Vicky for his failures, tricking the demons into leaving. While Michael's intentions were initially self-serving, he [[HeelFaceTurn grows]] to genuinely care for the group and manipulates events to ensure that the protagonists and many others are reformed enough to enter the Good Place, improving the Afterlife system and the Good Place upon discovering their flaws and persuades his former allies into helping him stop Gen from erasing all of existence, before reincarnating himself as a mortal human after accomplishing everything he desired.

* RainbowLens: Michael's desire to be a human has been argued as a possible [[https://www.themarysue.com/michael-good-place-trans-allegory/ transgender metaphor.]]