<em>The Good Place </em>Visualized the Unimaginable
This article contains spoilers through Season 4, Episode 12 of The Good Place.
When The Good Place airs its final episode tonight, it will be the end of one of the most daring thought experiments in TV history. Over four seasons of the NBC sitcom, in which Eleanor Shellstrop (played by Kristen Bell) navigates the topsy-turvy afterlife, viewers have had their brains teased with philosophical dilemmas, metaphysical mysteries, and a Ph.D. thesis’s worth of fake gossip about real-world celebrities.
But while the show’s heady themes and jokes have been much dissected, its striking visuals have been almost underrated. The creator, Mike Shur, and his team imagined hell, heaven, and the various spaces in between as a brightly lit, graphically bold remix of our own world. Again and again, they faced the task of visualizing the abstract and unthinkable: A crossroad in space-time became a pancake hole; the “void” that housed the all-knowing being Janet (D’Arcy Carden) resembled an Apple commercial.
To learn about the creative process behind ’s kookily memorable look, I spoke with Adam Rowe, the show’s art director. His job is to implement the ideas of the showrunners, directors, and production designer by working with setHe joined the series in Season 3, when the show’s original “Good Place” collapsed and the heroes were reincarnated on Earth. And then he worked on the fourth and final season, in which those heroes attempt to design a new and improved afterlife for humankind. This conversation has been edited.
