It’s been some time since Michael Schur’s existential sitcom “The Good Place,” one of the best comedies of its era, came to an end on NBC. The series starred Kristen Bell as Eleanor Shellstrop, a truly bad person who meets an early demise and finds herself suddenly whisked away to the idyllic Good Place — or so it seems. Believing she was brought here by accident, she leads a trio of other morally compromised individuals to try and become more ethical people who can actually earn their place in the benevolent afterlife.
For fans who are still heartbroken that the show ended without getting a single Emmy win, there is an overlooked spin-off series that they can dive right into to get a fresh taste of the show’s unique blend of goofy humor and existential philosophizing. Because in the aftermath of the show’s third season, in which reformed Bad Place architect Michael (Ted Danson) successfully argues that Eleanor and her friends have been reformed, Judge Gen (Maya Rudolph) proposes an experiment in which Michael and Eleanor will have to repeat their successful redemption on four new Bad Place residents.
In the lead-up to the fourth and last season of “The Good Place,” NBC released a web miniseries called “The Selection” that follows Bad Place demon boss Shawn (Marc Evan Jackson) and a boardroom full of underlings figuring out who the four most evil people they can choose to ruin Michael’s experiment. Even the most devoted “Good Place” fans might have missed “The Selection” because it was only released on NBC’s YouTube channel and the NBC app, but the series is well worth diving into for one last bite-sized taste of the Bad Place.
The Selection sends us to the Bad Place where hell is one big board room
Over its four seasons, “The Good Place” explored every inch of its bureaucratic afterlife, where the world waiting for us after we die is just as dysfunctional as the one we left behind. In the titular Good Place, everyone in charge is a goody-two-shoes who is completely incapable of making any decision lest they cause even a smidge of harm to a single blade of grass.
Meanwhile, the demons running the Bad Place have run roughshod over humanity, successfully shifting the goalposts so that even the most kind-hearted human can land themselves in the Bad Place for the crime of eating an organic tomato (that was farmed by overworked migrant labor). The Bad Place is the polar opposite of its archrivals, where everything delicious is disgusting and everything bad is pleasurable, and the spin-off web series “The Selection” gives us a painfully close look at how the Bad Place works to undermine Michael’s plans for saving mankind.
Over the course of six two-minute episodes, Shawn assembles a crack squad of bickering demons to choose which four humans to send to Michael’s Medium Place for testing. While everyone wants to send Hitler (Adolf or Steve, either one will do), the rules say they must pick four humans of equivalent badness to Eleanor and her friends. What follows is a series of arguments over whether they should send a misogynist slam poet from Palo Alto or the first person to say “let’s think outside the box.”
While this web series is, in total, barely the length of a single episode of “The Good Place,” discovering its existence for the first time five years later is like finding a lost letter from an old friend, albeit one that is painfully brief. It’s worth checking out if you need your fill of “The Good Place” in between its move from Netflix to Prime Video on streaming.