'The Good Place,' a sitcom about ethics in the age of Trump, heads for TV heaven by realchriswilson
SOUTH BEND, Ind. — It’s a Monday morning at the start of the academic year at the University of Notre Dame, and a freshman is asking a lecturer about the Trolley Problem, a well-known exercise in practical ethics. A runaway train is about to hit five track workers. You can let them die by doing nothing, or you can switch the train to a different track with just a single worker on it. You would save five lives, but the one fatality would be the direct result of your actions.
Schur, who is 43, has had a brilliant career in comedy, along the well-trod path from the Harvard Lampoon to “Saturday Night Live” and then “The Office,” before creating “Parks and Recreation” and “Brooklyn 99.” In 2016, NBC Entertainment offered him the rare opportunity to create 13 episodes of any series he’d like.
What does it even mean to be good? Admission to the Good Place is based on a point system, where positive actions increase your total while negative actions will cost you . Accrue a high enough point total during your life on Earth and you enter the Good Place.
And the definition of ethics has expanded to cover issues as big as the entire ecosphere and as small and personal as “microaggressions” toward strangers. Pamela Hieronymi, a UCLA professor who has served as one of the consulting philosophers on “The Good Place,” has called the current moment “a cultural blamefest” in which people try to realign a society that has traditionally subjugated certain groups.
Schur may not be exaggerating about the cultural salience of ethical issues. Former ethics lawyers from the George W. Bush and Obama administrations agreed that Trump’s first year was the most unethical ever for a presidency. Five Cabinet secretaries have left the current administration under suspicion of corruption.
May believes the show offers a potential antidote to polarization by both offering a moral model and reminding viewers that people are complicated, and redemption is possible.
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