A Goodbye To 'The Good Place'

Endings are sad, but without them, nothing matters.

That was only one of the lessons of the thoughtful, emotional finale of NBC's The Good Place, which itself ended after four seasons and only 52 episodes. But, as the show itself stressed in its last couple of installments, heaven is not continuing forever. It's leaving at the right time, when you've done your work. When you're ready.

Creator Michael Schur, who also was behind , has a kind of grudging, aggravated optimism that echoes in a lot of his work. was full of reminders of how petty and nasty people can be when they're not specifically trying to discipline their worst instincts. It was also emphatic about the fact that it's almost impossible to successfully weave your way through the complicated world of trying to be decent, given the way our current systems of commerce and government work. Similarly, the people we knew in Pawnee, Indiana were constantly besieged by smallness and