Viola Davis, winner of the Best Supporting Actress award for ‘Fences’ poses in the press room during the 89th Annual Academy Awards at Hollywood & Highland Center on February 26, 2017 in Hollywood, California.
“You have mistaken me; everything I write is to myself. Even if it is a letter explaining how so fervently I am in love with somebody, I am writing to myself. It is me telling my future self: This how you felt at this point in time. It’s me saying, ‘If you have fallen out of love or sunk back into misery or lost your purpose in the shadow of grief, I am showing you that you were happy once, and you can be happy once again.”
the thing I really like about The Good Place is that it thematically revolves around ethics and what makes a person good or bad (both in the sense of– how do we define good and bad, and in the sense of–what aspects of someone’s formative environment and social group influence how they will treat other people).
and the conclusion that the show comes to over and over is both that it is possible to become a better person, and because it’s possible we owe it to each other to keep trying to be better– for all eternity if we must.
there’s no end to it, and (should I make a prediction) no real “good place” where you’ve gotten to the finish line and “won” at being a good person. it’s an eternal commitment to other people.
you create your own good place, because whether you’re in a good place or a bad place is defined by how people treat each other. when your community has collectively learned to respect, value, and help each other, you experience the peace and support that you might have once imagined in the abstract being awarded to the truly “good”
Sartre famously said that the Bad Place is other people. The Good Place argues that the Good Place is, too.
