What's The Big Idea?

 My wife and I have watched, or binged as the kids say, the NBC television series The Good Place. A couple tings about this saturation viewing. First of all, these days of shelter in place have provided opportunities that might not otherwise have existed to park on the couch and take in all that TV goodness. Secondly a network sitcom, once the commercial breaks have been excised, run about twenty-two minutes. You can cram in three episodes in just over an hour. And you can forget about those cliffhangers. Just keep on keeping on. It does help if the show is captivating enough to keep all that keeping on worthwhile.

The Good Place is that. Or was, since it's now a part of broadcasting history. The fourth and final season has been placed in the time capsule of streaming services and now the discussion can begin about where it stacks up in the sit com pantheon. Of course, greatness in a category that includes such titles as Joanie Loves Chachi and My Mother The Car does not seem like that big a feat. What makes The Good Place a diversion from the dominant paradigm of your standard prime time dreck is the ideas it chose to wrestle with over the course of its run. Without giving too much away, if you haven't seen any of it, the story concerns the afterlife, good and evil and the philosophy of Immanuel Kant. And it's funny stuff.

But I couldn't help but wonder what was on the cutting room floor. What must have gone on in the writer's room? I know from history and anecdotal experience with the process of making movies and TV that what we end up seeing at the end of the process is just a sliver of all the creativity that happens from that moment of inspiration to the filtered and watered down version that becomes mass media. Finding ways to dance on the edge of cleverness and big ideas while maintaining sponsorship from corporate America is a tricky vocation, because it is a business after all. Show business. And if somewhere along the line you end up making our audience contemplate their very existence, then kudos to you. 

Because inevitably the meetings that take place in anticipation of the production of popular entertainment are more interesting than the popular entertainment itself. All of the discussion and debate that went into making a situation comedy about life and death and how we treat one another would be, I think, very interesting to watch. Maybe not four seasons worth, but at least twenty-two minutes worth.