NBC will stay in “The Good Place” a little bit longer than usual for the afterlife comedy’s series finale.
The network will wrap up “The Good Place” on Jan. 30 with a 90-minute block that will feature an extra-long episode and a post-show special with the whole cast hosted by Seth Meyers. The runtime of the episode has not been set, and the aftershow will fill out the rest of the 90 minutes.
The series is wrapping up with just a little more than 50 episodes, something series creator Mike Schur explained was influenced by “Breaking Bad’s” short-run (62 episodes over 5 seasons). He wanted “The Good Place” to have the same “narrative propulsion,” which included upending the status-quo multiple times during each season.
That led “The Good Place” to be hailed as one of the most narratively ambitious shows.
“I thought that at the beginning that the show could, if given the chance, describe what it meant to be a good person,” Schur said during the show’s farewell panel at the Television Critics Association press tour this summer. “I think that objective kind of shifted a little bit, because what we found as we discussed it and wrote it and executed it, is that some very, very smart people over the last 3,000 years have had a lot of very different opinions about that question.”
The show’s fourth and final season has seen “Team Cockroach” attempt to prove to The Judge (Maya Rudolph) that the point system for deciding who gets admittance into the Good Place is flawed, considering that no human has actually gotten in the last hundreds of years.
“At the beginning, I pitched [the show as] what it means to be a good person, and at the end I think I would describe this as a show that makes the argument that we all outta try harder than we are,” Schur summed up. “As long as you’re trying, you’re on the right path.”
For the full midseason schedule, click here.