The Good Place and Jean Paul Sartre! ~some~ spoilers

While being stuck at home, I started watching the tv show The Good Place and it is quite good. It is about a woman named Eleanor who dies and is sent to the Good Place, but the system messed up and thinks that she is someone else. Eleanor is a selfish and mean woman who doesn't care about anyone else. The system that decides if people belong in the Good Place or the Bad Place apparently messed up and thought she was a humanitarian who saved lives and was an amazing person. She has to lie in order to prevent her from being sent to the bad place and is taught moral philosophy by her "soulmate", a moral philosophy professor.

At the end of the first season, the four main characters get into a huge argument. Eleanor realizes they are in the Bad Place. They do not need traditional torture devices like flame throwers or knives. They are torturing each other. This immediately made me think of Jean Paul Sartre's play No Exit. After looking more into The Good Place online, I found out that the show is actually loosely based off of the ideas in No Exit.

At the beginning of the semester, one of the attendance questions was what is your favorite book, and mine wasn't actually a book but the play No Exit so I was very excited to learn that the show's premise was based off of that play. I then went back and reread No Exit and was able to find some more similarities.

The characters in No Exit arrive in hell and are confused because it does not look like the traditional idea of hell. There are only 3 couches in a room where the characters are brought into. The Good Place does not actually look like hell either. It seems like a happy normal town. Two of the characters in No Exit have a hard time figuring out why they were sent to hell because they both thought they were good people. One of the woman however openly admits all the evil things she has done and acknowledges that she belongs in hell. This is similar to Eleanor knowing she does not really belong in the Good Place while the other main characters believe that they were great people on Earth and deserve to be there.

On top of the direct connection to No Exit, I have also just been nerding out in general watching this show every time they reference a specific philosopher or branch of moral philosophy. If any of you haven't seen it, I highly recommend watching it (sorry I gave away what happens in the first season but I was too excited not to share!). I also suggest reading No Exit because it is my favorite story! It is a short one act and an easy read; not a lot of jargon. It really reframed my thinking the first time I read it and each time I read it I feel like I notice new subtleties and learn new stuff.