The next season of The Good Place will be the last

NBC’s The Good Place is different from most network sitcoms. For one, it has a whole lot on its mind, namely examining what it means to live a good and ethical life. Are human beings basically good? Basically bad? What do we owe each other? It gets knotty.

And funny. Don’t worry, there’s still space for jokes about the Time-Knife in between all the moral philosophizing:

Another way The Good Place is atypical is its pacing. Unlike sitcoms like The Office orThe Big Bang Theory, where there’s a basic status quo and the show can keep going as long as the writers come up with new stuff for the characters to do, The Good Place has always seemed like it was working towards an endgame. First our trio of dead humans were spending the afterlife in a seemingly idyllic small town, then they took a tour of hell the bad place, then they return to Earth to see if they can live morally upright lives this time around, then they go to heaven the actual good place, and now they’re about to return to a new version of that small town from before with a new group of people to determine if humans can, indeed, change for the better. This show moves, people.

And it looks like that’s why it will be wrapping up in the near future. As showrunner Michael Schur said in an open letter the other day, the team intends to end the series the same way it began: at a great speed, without treading water and artificially extending its lifespan beyond its natural endpoint. Read his announcement below:

Schur, who also worked on great sitcoms like Parks and Recreation and Brooklyn Nine-Nine, went into more detail about the decision to end The Good Place after season 4 with The Hollywood Reporter:

"We spent all of season three checking in and making sure that we were pacing things correctly and there was going to be enough time to do what we wanted but not too much time so that we were running in place….It was completely dictated by the idea and how much juice I thought the idea contained and the pace at which we were letting story unfold and stuff like that. The nice thing about TV shows nowadays is it’s not a forced marathon. You can let the idea dictate the number of episodes that you actually do, which is great for creativity."

The final season will consist of 14 episodes with an hour-long series finale. “We’re just chewing up story at an incredibly fast rate and it immediately makes sense that we would want to get out on our own terms and not feel like we were throttling back and moving more slowly or deliberately than we have to this point,” Schur said. “That just wouldn’t seem like the same show. So we’re going full tilt until the end. Everybody at the end of the day is happy that we’re going to end it the way we started it — at a breakneck speed, with a lot of crazy, wild twists and turns…You’re going to get the sense as you watch the final season — about halfway through you’re going to see there’s no way that this isn’t the endgame.”

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I’ll be sad to lose The Good Place, but Schur is right that the format doesn’t lend itself to a long run-time. Particularly when your show is about philosophy, you want to end it while you still have something to say.

As of yet, there’s no exact release date for The Good Place season 4, but expect it sometime later this year.

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