‘Good Place’ should have been a winner
The Bad Place is being ignored at the Emmys.
“The Good Place,” Michael Schur’s hilarious, heartbreaking NBC sitcom about the afterlife, wrapped its fourth and final season in January, closing out its story as its creator saw fit, on his schedule.
But the show may as well have ended 10 years ago for all the recognition it got at Sunday night’s Emmys, which is to say none.
In fact, “The Good Place” never won an Emmy across its four-season run, despite 13 nominations, including six this year.
It’s hard to say the show was ever snubbed. D’Arcy Carden, the delightful not-a-human, not-a-robot Janet, lost to Annie Murphy for supporting actress in a comedy in a year when literally no show could shake “Schitt’s Creek” from the top of the ladder, and Ted Danson did the same against Eugene Levy for lead actor in a comedy.
In 2019, the show lost out on outstanding comedy series to Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s outstanding “Fleabag,” which similarly dominated the award show, while Danson lost again, that time to “Barry’s” Bill Hader. A year earlier, Danson also lost to Hader.
But this weird little network show deserved better.
“The Good Place” was a genuinely good television show. It was funny, clever and original in a land of reboots and revivals.
The characters were good: the dirtbag f rom Arizona who learned to love herself, the neurotic professor who found calm, the Florida man who discovered normalcy, the highbrow Brit who figured it all out, the evil demon who wanted to be good and the AI who found a heart.
The acting was good: Kristen Bell, William Jackson Harper, Manny Jacinto, Jameela Jamil, Danson and Carden.
“If there is a single message to the show, it’s that you are going to fail a lot and you have to keep trying,” Schur told the Daily News last year, ahead of the fourth season premiere.
“You’re going to blow it. You have to just start over again.”
What more i mportant moral, when the world is falling apart, than to keep trying to be better?
That deserved a trophy.