History YMMV / TheGoodPlace

** One of the Bad Place demons attempting to hack a door to Earth is Creator/HarveyGuillen, one year before his star turn on ''Series/WhatWeDoInTheShadows''.
** John, one of the subjects of the experimental Good Place in seasons 3 and 4, is Isaac Higgentoot from ''[[Series/GhostsUS Ghosts]]''.

* MoralEventHorizon:
** Trevor, despite being a demon and thus it's part of his job to torture, crosses it when [[spoiler:he gleefully attempts to sabotage the Soul Squad's attempts to get into the Good Place because it's more "fun" than to report Michael's benevolent interference to Gen, which would have netted the same result since the system was rigged against the humans anyway]].
** Doug and Donna crossed it with their emotional abuse toward Eleanor. [[spoiler:Even though Donna has changed after faking her death and starting a new life with a single father and his daughter, Eleanor pretty much tells Donna that she better not fork up Patricia's life with her emotional abuse or abandon her the way Donna emotionally abandoned Eleanor]].
** Likewise, Tahani's parents crossed it by pitting their two daughters against each other and fostering inferiority complexes in them both. [[spoiler:They eventually do 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 may have known 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]].
** If Shawn hadn't crossed it before, he definitely crossed it when he [[spoiler: told Michael that if the humans fail and are sent to the Bad Place, they will be tortured forever by Vicky wearing a Michael suit so they spend eternity believing he has returned to torturing them]].
** Vicky crosses it when [[spoiler:she uses her Michael skin-suit to taunt a captive Janet and ask why Michael even cared for her]].
** 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]].
** Ultimately, however, the series as a whole [[spoiler:rejects the entire concept of the MoralEventHorizon. When Team Cockroach realise that the idea that some people are utterly irredeemable is one of the major flaws of the points system, they replace it with a system that gives everyone, no matter how bad, as many chances as it takes to rise above their flaws and become their best self, no matter how many eons it takes.]]

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

* SoBadItsGood: The show's special effects are so obviously fake and at times laughable due to the CGI in NBC shows often being pretty terrible in general, but it works to the show's quirky charm.
* SpecialEffectFailure: There's something off about the green-screen effects in [[Recap/TheGoodPlaceS4E05EmployeeOfTheBearimy "Employee of the Bearimy"]] when Jason and Michael are on the cart to The Bad Place, or when Eleanor and Tahani are standing in front of the lake house.

* RetroactiveRecognition: Two of the members of Trevor's Bad Place crew in season 1, episode 9 are [[Series/GLOW2017 Arthie and Melrose]].

* ProtagonistCenteredMorality: In season three, Michael and Janet interfere to prevent Tahani and Jason from getting together on Earth on the dubious grounds that it might tear the group apart. Setting aside the fact that this is likely untrue, given that it did no such thing when they were together in the previous season, it also comes across as being motivated by selfish motives on Janet's part, as she had previously argued ''against'' interfering when it came to Chidi and Simone starting a romantic relationship.

** Going into AlternativeCharacterInterpretation territory, some speculate that Brent is on the autistic spectrum, which might be why he's especially bad at understanding social cues and is so resistant to change.

** Jason is often regarded as nothing more than a KindheartedSimpleton, and while it's true that he doesn't really deserve to be tortured for eternity, this doesn't change the fact that he's still a robber, drug dealer, and generally a selfish jerk. He's also not ''so'' dumb that he is genuinely incapable of understanding morality or how his actions affect other people. He has enough of a sense of morals to [[EvenEvilHasStandards consider Eleanor's parents as terrible people]] and to question why [[spoiler:Tahani is in The Bad Place despite her philanthropic efforts.]] Ironically, [[spoiler:he does undergo a HeelFaceTurn for real in Season 3 by vowing to shed crimes and to learn how to be a better person on relearning his memories]].

* OrphanedReference: In the episode "Leap to Faith", [[spoiler: Michael gives the humans a subliminal message to trust him by making a very subtle allusion to one of Chidi's ethics lessons. This is kinda weird, because previous episodes had done nothing but establish that Michael did not pay attention or understand any of Chidi's lessons. In fact, there was never any indication Michael was ever even ''allowed'' to return to Chidi's class after he got kicked out, so how he ever learned to make such a specific (and accurate) reference is left unexplained. However, this whole plot point seems to be a remnant from a DeletedScene. In "The Trolley Problem", there was another scene in the one month TimeSkip in which all of Chidi's students did an essay about moral particularism - including Michael, who got an A+. It was made clear that not only did Michael return to the classes, but he actually started to learn from them. However, the scene was left out of the final cut, so now the buildup to Michael's allusion in the later episode is lost.]]

* OrphanedReference: In the episode "Leap to Faith", [[spoiler: Michael gives the humans a subliminal message to trust him by making a very subtle allusion to one of Chidi's ethics lessons. This is kinda weird, because previous episodes had done nothing but establish that Michael did not pay attention or understand any of Chidi's lessons. There was still no indication Michael was ever even ''allowed'' to return to Chidi's class after he got kicked out, so how he ever learned to make such a specific (and accurate) reference is left unexplained. However, this whole plot point seems to be a remnant from a DeletedScene. In "The Trolley Problem", there was another scene in the one month TimeSkip in which all of Chidi's students did an essay about moral particularism - including Michael, who got an A+! It was made clear that not only did Michael return to the classes, but he actually started to learn from them. However, the scene was left out of the final cut, so now the buildup to Michael's allusion in the later episode is lost.]]

* StrangledByTheRedString: In the second season, Tahani and Jason become a couple more or less solely because Tahani finds Jason good at sex. Sure, Tahani and Jason work just fine as friends, but as a romantic couple they don't have much chemistry, and this becomes evident when Tahani has to call Janet in to help her with the problems in their relationship. In doing this, it quickly becomes apparent the real reason the show is doing this plot line; [[LoveTriangle it's to cause conflict with Janet.]] In season three, pretty much the same thing happens (Tahani and Jason getting together, with Janet being jealous) except this time, Tahani and Jason get married for literally no other reason than so Jason can have more money. [[spoiler:Tahani completely disregards their marital status once they die again and learn Jason used to be married to Janet, and, just a few episodes later, Jason forgets all about their relationship and happily gets together with Janet.]] Considering Jason and Tahani were together for about half of the show, the couple has less fans than you might expect, and even in that small group, an even smaller amount of people genuinely prefer it over Janet and Jason.

* StrangledByTheRedString: In the second season, Tahani and Jason become a couple more or less solely because Tahani finds Jason good at sex. Sure, Tahani and Jason work just fine as friends, but as a romantic couple they don't have much chemistry, and this becomes evident when Tahani has to call Janet in to help her with the problems in their relationship. In doing this, it quickly becomes apparent the real reason the show is doing this plot line; [[LoveTriangle it's to cause conflict with Janet.]] In season three, pretty much the same thing happens (Tahani and Jason getting together, with Janet being jealous) except this time, Tahani and Jason get married for literally no other reason than so Jason can have enough money [[spoiler:to stay in Australia. Tahani completely disregards their marital status once they die again and learn Jason used to be married to Janet, and, just a few episodes later, Jason forgets all about their relationship and happily gets together with Janet.]] Considering Jason and Tahani were together for about half of the show, the couple has less fans than you might expect, and even in that small group, an even smaller amount of people genuinely prefer it over Janet and Jason.

** [[Characters/TheGoodPlaceMichael Michael]] is a deceitful yet affable demon who arranges for a [[Characters/TheGoodPlaceNeighborhood group of souls]] to psychologically torture each other in the supposed [[Characters/TheGoodPlaceAfterlife Good Place]], having to play XanatosSpeedChess by orchestrating hundreds of demons to act out roles as the humans behave unpredictably. After the group figures out Michael's ploy, Michael erases their minds several times over before joining forces with them to scheme against the smug 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.

** [[spoiler:"''This'' is the Bad Place!"]]

** "Okay. But that's worse. You do get how that's worse, right?" [[labelnote:explanation]]Chidi's response to Eleanor's pride in being the top salesperson at a company selling fraudulent medicine has gotten major traction as a reaction image equivalent to "you're NotHelpingYourCase".[[/labelnote]]

** Misunderstanding Chidi's preference for French as meaning he can ''only'' speak French, and posting online about the massive PlotHole you've discovered when he speaks English for real in the S2 finale, will not get a good reaction. At the beginning of Season 3, he finally just explained it to remove all doubt. Chidi went to English speaking schools and went to an American university for undergrad which is why he has an American accent. [[note]]As a professor of the humanities at an English speaking university in the English speaking country of Australia, Chidi would have to be fluent in English. He’s also fluent in several other languages).[[/note]] This happened a lot. Schur explained on the podcast that they tried out having Chidi speak in a West African accent while filming the early episodes of season 3 but felt like it was jarring and out of place to suddenly have him speak in a completely different accent so they came up with that specific InUniverse justification.

** [[Characters/TheGoodPlaceMichael Michael]] is a deceitful yet affable demon who arranges for a [[Characters/TheGoodPlaceNeighborhood group of souls]] to psychologically torture each other in the supposed [[Characters/TheGoodPlaceAfterlife 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 the smug 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.

** Tahani at the end of season three resolves to be nice to John, despite the fact that he stalked and harassed her, in the hopes of making the experiment a success and saving his soul. He's not into that, at first. [[spoiler:The series ends with him hugging her goodbye in the real Good Place when she considers going through the door]].

* SoBadItsGood: The show's special effects are so obviously fake and at times laughable due to Creator/{{NBC}}'s CGI often being pretty bad, but it works to the show's quirky charm.