Michael Schur is a king of the workplace comedy. His shows Parks and Recreation and Brooklyn Nine-Nine have achieved widespread critical and commercial success, not to mention his years writing and producing on The Office. But for now at least, Schur is leaving the workplace sitcom behind to tackle something just a little heavier: the afterlife.
The Good Place, premiering Sept. 19 on NBC, stars Kristen Bell as a newly-dead resident of the good place, a heaven-esque world where frozen yogurt shops inhabit every corner and you can drink endless glasses of wine with no hangover. The hitch? She got in thanks to a clerical error that mixed her up with someone else—she's actually a pretty shitty person.
So what makes a person good or evil, and what makes someone really worthy of a world with endless free alcohol? Schur chatted with Esquire about his vision for the afterlife, lessons he learned from Parks and Recreation, and his prewriting attempt to study moral philosophies and ethics from the past 3,000 years.
How and when did you come up with the idea for The Good Place?
I finished making Parks and Recreation and was sort of just mulling over ideas for another show. This idea sort of popped into my head and was a long time in the making. Whenever people do something that annoys or irritates me, I have this instant reaction in my head. Like, if they cut me off on the freeway or something, I just think, "That's negative seven points!" And when someone does something nice, that's plus three points. I was imagining a sort of mathematical value to good and bad actions. And then I started imagining the afterlife as just a game. Maybe the answer we're all searching for is: it's just a game. There's some kind of omniscient formula, they're counting up all the points, and if you get enough points, you get in.
That started the ball rolling, and then it merged with this other feeling I've had for a long time, which is that I've wanted to write about what it means to be either a good person or a bad person. And I think I wanted to do that because I didn't think I knew. And I still don't know. I wanted to poke around and see what it means to be good or bad.
The Good Place was bought by NBC right in the room. Why do you think that story resonated with them so immediately?
Well, I don't know. I think that it's a high concept, and maybe they were just looking for high-concept shows. But if there's a deeper reason, it probably has something to do with the fact that it's attempting to answer a question everybody is constantly asking him or herself. It is one of those things you're wondering about, like what happens after we die? And what does it mean to be good or bad? Those are big questions. The show is attempting to go big-game hunting. In this landscape of television, where there's a billion shows on a billion channels, those kinds of ideas maybe have a little better shot of cutting through and being noisy.
What is it like to make this kind of show when you're coming off these workplace comedies like Parks and Recreation and The Office. How does your mindset change?
It was a lot more prep work. I felt pretty strongly that I shouldn't start writing the pilot until I knew a lot about what was going to happen in the series. I needed to really understand the rules of the universe and how characters related to each other. Even if I didn't end up using all those ideas, I spent far longer in research mode trying to lay out in my head how it would work.
And part of that was also talking to a lot of trusted friends and advisors and asking them questions about things they've worked on that are in a similar vein. I went out to lunch with Damon Lindelof of Lost, and I was like, "I feel like I'm dipping my toe into your water a little bit, can you tell me what I'm doing and whether this is a good idea or a bad idea?" Drew Goddard directed the pilot, and Drew is very much from the sci-fi world—he worked on Buffy and Angel and Alias and Lost, and he wrote The Martian. He has a lot of experience dealing with nontraditional… let's call them universes. That was a huge get for me to get him on board, because I felt much more secure swimming around in a pool that I didn't know.
Yeah, what other kinds of source material were you referencing? Are there any afterlife shows or movies you drew inspiration from?
I did a lot of research early on about conceptions of the afterlife in different religions. I did a ton of reading about it and it was really fun and fascinating. Then I realized after I'd done all of that it was so pointless because this show wasn't about religion; it was really about ethics and morality. I never studied moral philosophy in college. I have a very cocktail party understanding of it, but I read a lot of stuff and talked to a lot of people to understand what are the basic ideas that have emerged in ethics and moral philosophy for the last 400 years, and even ancient times. And that's where I drew inspiration from. Because the show isn't really about the afterlife. It's set in the afterlife, but it's really about being good or bad.
You created Parks and Recreation, which obviously had this great magic in the way the characters acted and reacted to each other. How do you generate that same kind of magic when you're starting over with a new show like The Good Place?
Well, it starts with Allison Jones, who is the greatest casting director in the world. We wrote some insane character descriptions and sent them to her and were like, good luck! The part of Tahani called for a tall, glamorous British woman of Indian or Pakistani descent. And then suddendly Jameela Jamil walked in and we were like, oh you found her. Exactly the person I imagined. So a lot of what people perceive is chemistry is just good casting directors and good writing.
But also the key is that you never try to recreate something that is lightning in a bottle. The Parks and Rec cast, which Allison also put together, has this kind of insane special sauce that I don't think I could possibly articulate. And some of it was just that people were really talented. It was Aziz Ansari and Aubrey Plaza and Chris Platt and Amy Poehler and Nick Offerman and Adam Scott and Rob Lowe and Rashida Jones. If you set out to try to recreate the vibe that group of people had, you'd fail because there is no other group of people like that. Really, all you can do is try to write the best episodes and the best stories you can and try to cast the best people you can. Hopefully there be a new and equally appealing vibe that emerges. But it's not something you can force.
How difficult is it to talk about such heavy topics—death, ethics, Heaven—in just a 30-minute sitcom? Especially in a 13-episode arc?
Well, it's not super easy. But it was very important to me...it's like a balancing act because the show is about different conceptions of good and bad, and it needed to have some weighty stuff in it—even if they're brief, about different philosophies and different writings of different thinkers over the past 3,000 years. But at the same time, it is a half-hour comedy show on NBC. It's gotta be funny. I think we did a pretty good job of making the show funny and interesting at the same time, but it is a constant back-and-forth, push-pull where I'm fighting for things in the edit room that are a little drier because I feel like it's important for the basic premise of the show. It's not easy, but if it were easy it wouldn't be any fun. The whole point of this show was to do something weird.
