thegoodplacepodcasts-blog - Tumblr blog

[thegoodplacepodcasts-blog]

Ch. 2: Allison Jones and Ben Harris, Casting Director, Alan Yang, Writer

Ch. 2: Allison Jones and Ben Harris, Casting Director, Alan Yang, Writer Featuring the voices of host Marc Evan Jackson (MEJ), casting directors Allison Jones (AJ) and Ben Harris (BH), and writer Alan Yang (AY). Intro and outro features D’Arcy Carden (DC) as Janet, and Ted Danson (TD) as Michael. Clips from 1X2 of The Good Place include the voices of Kristen Bell (KB) as Eleanor Shellstrop, and William Jackson Harper (WJH) as Chidi Anagonye.

Ding!

DC: Hi there, I’m Janet. Welcome to The Good Place, the podcast.

TD: Janet, what is a podcast?

DC: It’s like the radio but there’s no music and literally anyone can do one at any moment about any subject. And, there’s a billion of them!

TD: Sounds great! Hope you enjoy this week’s episode!

[Opening music]

MEJ: Welcome to The Good Place, the podcast. I’m Marc Evan Jackson, I play Shawn. Today we’re talking about episode 1X2, “Flying”. In the aftermath of the chaos, Eleanor tries to avoid suspicion, Michael is distraught and believes he’s made a mistake in his first neighbourhood, Tahani puts together a group of volunteers to clean the neighbourhood, but anyone who participates will miss out on flying day, Chidi volunteers Eleanor, but Eleanor hides trash quickly in order to fly which causes a trash storm and ultimately Chidi refusing to help her. Eleanor feels guilty and cleans the entire neighbourhood herself so Chidi changes his mind. The cliff-hanger of this episode is Eleanor receiving a mysterious note under her door that she doesn’t belong in the Good Place. This episode features guest cast Allyn Rachel, Amy Okuda, Susan Park, Jorge Diaz and Steve Berg, and today my guests are casting directors Allison Jones, Ben Harris, and the writer of the episode Alan Yang. Allison Jones, Ben Harris, Alan Yang, welcome! Everything is fine.

AY: Thanks for having us.

BH: Yeah.

AJ: Thank you.

AY: Also just wanna say, amazing hearing Marc just read that intro. That, that was the first take guys, no editing on that just amazing elocution.

MEJ: I appreciate it, does it bring back any memories – do you now recall the episode?

AY: I recall that episode, also yeah thanks for that recap. I was just telling these guys, it feels like we did this so long ago, ‘cause since then we did the second season, I was telling them I remember the episode I directed season 2, and you know, I also work on some other shows… so I think since then we did season 2 of Master of None and season 1 of this Amazon show that’s not out yet but yeah so, so thank you for that recap, otherwise man, I would have no idea what was going on.

MEJ: Of course, of course, so I guess to get us started, Alan, you had been – you know, you were in the room for season 1…

AY: I was! I was there for a lot of it, so the way that sort of happen was – you know I’d finished season 1 of Master of None, which was a show I did with Aziz Ansari and then I came back to LA, you know, we shot the show in New York and I have a bungalow on the Universal Studios lot with Mike Schur, the creator of The Good Place and my good friend, so we were both writing stuff in the bungalow and he was working on a show and gradually, as we’d walk together to go eat lunch, de would start giving me bits and pieces about the show and he was, ‘like what do you think of this? What do you think of this?’ and I would give him an opinion here or there, and he was like, ‘oh that’s interesting, that’s interesting’, then he pitched the whole pilot to me and I was like, wow that’s really good, and then eventually he was like, ‘What if you helped out on it a little bit’ and I was like ‘okay’ and he was like, ‘what if you were in the writers room a little’, I was like ‘okay’ and he’s like, ‘how about you write episode 2’ and I was like ‘okay’ so suddenly I was on this – I was on the staff. So yeah, it was really fun and, and I was excited to help out.

MEJ: Now what were the marching orders following the pilot – because obviously, the pilot establishes a bananas world, and what was the goal of episode two? I mean, you know, you had to play off that she found herself there incorrectly –

AY: Well, the whole season I would say was kind of broken as this… very cohesive, almost movie-like single narrative, and that is – so much of it comes from Mike’s brain. You know he had the pilot, I believed he pitched not only the pilot but a good amount of the first season when he pitched the show, so when he came into the room it was a fun – just a fun group of people, a lot of old Parks and Rec people, you know I worked on Parks and Rec for the whole run of that show as well, so it was a lot of old friends and y’know, a lot of what was in Mike’s brain – so he sort of had kind of the ending, which is you know, crazy twist ending.

MEJ: Mmhmm.

AY: And then along the way it was very important to him, you know, some of the inspirations for this show – and I think he said this before – were some of these Damon Lindelof shows and these buddies were ____ (?) , so like Lost and The Leftovers and stuff like that, and so each episode it was important not only to establish the characters – and there’s a lot of character combis like there was in Parks and Rec, The Office, but a lot of cliff-hangers and so the cliff-hanger at the end of episode 2 was the start of many, many, many cliff-hangers to come.

MEJ: Oh my goodness yes, cliff-hangers including some brilliant cast that were discovered, found, searched for, gathered by Allison Jones and Ben Harris. Part of the magic I think of these people is that they weren’t household names prior, these were people I think specifically of the character of Jiayu – later Jason Mendoza – that’s a person we have to buy as someone who could be a silent monk, right?

AJ: Yeah.

MEJ: If that had been an actor that we’d seen on The Office or Parks, you’d go, ‘I’ve heard that person talk before, I don’t – ’

AJ: Yeah.

MEJ: He’s gonna talk eventually, right, he’s the gun over the fireplace (?) or whatever. Tell us everything that goes into finding geniuses.

AJ: The writing first of all.

MEJ: Okay.

AJ: It starts with the writing, period, in every, every occasion. Secondly, it is in pilots – there’s a lot of legwork involved where you’re meeting a lot of – you do what’s called a breakdown and you send out agents a description of the character and you read many, many, many people, hoping to find a new face in TV pilots. That’s always the best thing to do, Mike Schur loves to do that, Mike Schur loves a challenge.

MEJ: Mmhmm.

AJ: That one required a lot of leg work and a lot of pre-reading and a lot of guys, and I was not sure of many of the future actions of these particular characters, especially him being a silent monk…

MEJ: Right.

AJ: This one was fun because he was actually supposed to be an idiot, so it was really funny to read them and then have them do the stupid dialogue.

MEJ: Mmhmm.

AJ: Which was truly funny, we had about 5 great guys for that, Ben and I remember reading Manny in our office –

BH: Yeap.

AJ: And Jordan Rodrigues and all these good guys who once they opened their – they looked pious and serious

BH: Rene Gube.

AJ: Rene Gube… they looked pious and serious but then they could do the dumb really well.

MEJ: [Laughter]

AJ: Which is always a delightful thing to cast.

MEJ: That was the step of not only “I don’t always want to be a DJ in Jacksonville…”

AJ: Oh my god.

MEJ: “Maybe I’ll be a DJ in Tampa.”

BH: Yes.

AJ: Yeah we heard that a lot, yeah.

BH: A lot.

AJ: We heard a lot of those, I don’t know if you were in it, you weren’t in on the pilot initially…

AY: No, not for this show, for other shows I’ve been –

AJ: It was terribly funny, we went with a lot of different diverse choices blah blah blah blah, but you really want someone to believably be a Thai monk…

MEJ: Mmhmm.

AJ: And it was just delightful having to find someone who could get the comedy, and also do it without seeming fake.

MEJ: Now the – Alan, do you remember, at all, if you put anything in the stage direction at one point, still as Jianyu he comforts Ted silently, he comforts the character of Michael and sort of puts his reassuring hand on… Were there any thoughts that you offered the character, like what he means to be saying silently?

AY: I think there was a lot of stage direction for Manny because he doesn’t even have lines for a long time! We were putting stuff in the script to get him stuff to do but you know he also – he, he made that character something really great, especially y’know, after the reveal happens, and – and man it was really fun writing those dirtbag Florida lines. I know there was a lot, and later the Jacksonville Jaguars stuff.

MEJ: Oh the Bortle stuff.

AY: Yeah, the stuff that happens in season 2. It’s really funny because then the Jaguars got really good.

MEJ: They got good, somehow.

AY: But yeah –

AJ: – The budhole was my favourite –

AY: – yeah exactly! And it ended up in Many and Joe Mande going to Florida, going to Jaguars games and playoffs, which was great.

BH: Aw right!

MEJ: I saw that.

AY: But yeah just a delight to write for him, and – and man working with him on set was great. You know season 2, I was on set more so it was really, really great to work with him.

MEJ: The… it was it deserves lauding, his ability to you know, convey so much silently because it, it would be tempting as an actor, I tell you, to really ham up those lines and sort of be doing a lot of facial-ness as though you’re saying like, ‘this bank is being robbed please call the police’ you know, like trying to convey a lot with your eyebrows, and he was so subtle and great. About some of the other characters I – it’s my understanding from Mike that you saw everybody in the world for Janet, it could have been a child, it could have been an old person, is that true?

BH: Yeap, very much so. I mean just for – actually just for Mike we probably auditioned 50 people?

MEJ: Is that right?

BH: And that’s, you know, then we’d also pre-read, just Allison and I in our office.

AJ: It’s also years of trying to find funny women who didn’t have to be gorgeous. With all due respect to D’Arcy, ‘cause she’s pretty –

MEJ: Sure, she’s very pretty (?)

AJ: But we didn’t have to have the funny gorgeous woman. We didn’t have to have – we could just have the woman who was the funniest.

MEJ: But a very ef–

AJ: So we thought that would be easy, and it wasn’t easy.

BH: It was not it was actually the most –

AJ: No, ‘cause there were so many good women.

BH: – difficult role to cast.

MEJ: I can’t imagine.

AJ: Mmhmm.

MEJ: It’s my understanding that from D’Arcy that it the breakdown didn’t even include sort of a Siri or Alexa kind of thing.

BH: No.

AJ: They didn’t want anybody to know –

BH – that it was robiotic

AJ: – anything about those points

MEJ: Interesting.

AJ: Yeah.

MEJ: But often oftentimes the breakdown includes like, gender and an age range kind of thing, and that wasn’t – you were saying you were told to go find what?

BH: It was pretty all over the –

AJ: Funny.

BH: Yeah it was just, we were just looking for funny.

MEJ: That’s amazing.

AJ: And for us, that’s the dream.

BH: Yes, that is ideal.

AJ: So we were, like can we bring in 10 more women for you please, yeah. And out of that group we have cast a lot of the other people on the show too.

BH: – and I –

AJ: Because we, we’ve seen, Mike always remembers who he likes.

BH: – and I think –

AJ: And will use them again.

BH: – with the pilot, Mike had written dummy sides.

MEJ: Right, fake.

BH: Right, fake sides for –

MEJ: Little bits of script that aren’t really going to be in the show.

BH: – and with Janet instead of saying Alexa – I, he had her being a, I think it was like a ph- an operator.

MEJ: A helpline.

BH: Yeah a helpline, and that was I think how he tried to get the Alexa or Siri.

AJ: We even brought in JJ Totah, who then went on to star in NBC’s Champions.

BH: That’s right.

AJ: And he was hilarious and Mike was going to use him for something, but I believe that’s a part that possibly you got instead.

MEJ: Is that right?

AJ: Yeap!

MEJ: I like that.

AJ: One of the bad guys.

MEJ: I’m happy with the recasting.

AJ: [Laughter]

MEJ: So it’s my understanding as well that Jameela, I know that she was a BBC presenter but not an actor prior to this, what… how did you, or had you been aware of her prior?

AJ: Oh god no, that was a, that was a tough one.

BH: That was also ___ (?)

AJ: that had to, that was pretty specific, a British-Indian beautiful actress and so we did a breakdown and read quite a few women, and she came on a Saturday – ‘cause in pilot season you’re frequently working on Saturdays, you can read people on Saturdays ‘cause they’re not working on other things.

MEJ: Oh wow.

AJ: And she came in and she was this giantess, personality-wise and physically and –

MEJ: [Laughter]

AJ: I think she intimidated everybody in the waiting room.

BH: Very much so.

AJ: And she was, she was great, I think she freaked out everybody when she first auditioned, Mike’s like, ‘woah!’ and then it was basically, how do you say no to Jameela ‘cause she was delightful.

MEJ: She is, she is a force of nature.

AJ: Oh my god.

AY: It’s hard to know where Jameela ends and Tahani begins.

AJ: Yeah.

AY: Because in the show she knows everyone famous, and then in real life she like – I, I –

AJ: Same thing.

AY: I know! I directed this Jay-Z video last year and I was talking to Jameela about it and she’s like, oh I know Jay and Beyonce and then, and then this – I went to this, I went to this party that, this Oscar party that Jay-Z and Beyonce threw and I walk in and Jameela’s there and…

AJ: No way!

AY: Of course I’m like, oh there, there you are and she’s like, she knows everybody there.

AJ: I didn’t know that.

AY: Her boyfriend is James Blake the singer and like yeah, she’s regularly hanging out with these people so alright.

BH: And I believe she told me this, I think it was her first audition like for –

AJ: I think it was.

AY: Well, good for her!

AJ: I didn’t know, I don’t know what a presenter is.

MEJ: A host.

AJ: I always am asking my British friends ‘what is a presenter’ and ‘do you look down on them acting wise’ and they’re like, ‘yes we do!’

MEJ: [Laughter]

AJ: I asked this great British casting director Lucy Bevan, ‘Do you know Jameela Jamil?’ and she said, ‘I looked her up, I think she’s a presenter’ and I don’t even know, there are so many of them on British television…

MEJ: Right.

AJ: But she is instinct, her timing is incredible, her comedy timing is incredible.

MEJ: She’s also fearless, like I saw her interviewing Russell Brand and she mopped the floor with Russell Brand.

AJ: Yes, I’m sure she did.

MEJ: Which is not an easy task.

AJ: She has more of an Essex accent, like she has a great London, East London type of accent naturally I think, and so she – she caught the posh accent for Good Place and it really works.

MEJ: Mmhmm.

AJ: I forget what the reason was for why she has the British accent though, on the show, and nobody else does.

AY: There is some in universe lore for that, yes, there an explanation.

AJ: I know there is an explanation, yeah.

AY:  I think, I think it’s if you want to sound like that you can, I think the theory was she wanted to keep it or something.

MEJL It’s mentioned?

AY: Yeah, I think so.

BH: Yes.

AJ: Yeah.

BH: They address it.

AJ: ‘Cause we interviewed some great British actresses for that over there, and here there’s, there’s a number of them and they were great, but she was just a, a force of nature and funny and sort of shocking, and she’s pretty dirty in person. She’s pretty dirty-mouthed, potty-mouth, yeah…

MEJ: She’s a bit of a dude.

AJ: Oh, yeah.

MEJ: Yeah, I think that’s why we hit it off so well immediately. I mean all of these people are, are delightful. We, we talked before, we in recording, you know Mike has a policy – like Mike curates just great people, cast and crew.

AJ: Yeah, mmhmm.

MEJ: There doesn’t appear to be a lot of drama. William Jackson Harper, how did he come across your desk?

BH He was –

AJ: Same thing.

BH: Yeah he was out in New York.

AJ: Yeah, his agent taped him in New York.

MEJ: Did you know immediately?

AJ: No, never a shoo-in.

MEJ: Is that right – is that a, across any –

AJ: I have to say – that’s… to dispel that myth. For me it’s never a shoo-in.

MEJ: That’s fascinating.

AJ: They’ll say it is but it, it never is and if a director goes ‘that’s the one I want!’ then it’s probably going to tank.

MEJ: That’s the kiss of death, really?

AJ: I don’t think the kiss of death but I don’t, I don’t ever think someone is a shoo-in. I never would have thought he was a shoo-in for that.

MEJ: Interesting.

AJ: And Mike and Alan, you all see what you want – what you like in the character and then how you can fit that into the world you’re creating. William Jackson Harper was just a damn good actor when he came in. Really good. He had some stiff competition, too.

BH: I’ve said besides Ted and Kristen…

AJ: Yeah.

BH: Everyone else all those other roles that we would actually test and find a new face. They were all – it was not an easy decision.

AJ: No, Mike – Mike, he was tortured a bit.

BH: Yes, very much so:

AJ: Yeah, ‘causewe got some good choices.

BH: But after the test I think it was, you know, Mike was –

AJ: He had us over there one night to talk about it.

BH: Yeah.

AJ: And we couldn’t help him on that one.

BH: It was, it was a laden night.

AY: You might say a Chidi level of indecision.

BH: Yes –

AJ: Yes.

BH: – Very true.

AY: Agonising, it was causing chest and stomach pains…

AJ: Completely, absolutely.

AY: Yeah. William – William was as skilled an actor you know, he’s able to do the dramatic stuff and the comedic stuff and you know sort of working with him reminded me of Adam Scott on Parks and Rec where he’s really able to do the straight man stuff, but also be so – so funny and yeah he really, he’s really been great in the show.

AJ: Mike’s always been willing to see someone who is not particularly right for the part, and who may not knock you out at first, and then you think about it and he’s like, ‘that’s who I want to write for’. I have to assume writers look at this and say, ‘who do I want to write for?’

AY: It’s al– I always feel like the best stuff is when the actors own personality starts imbuing the character.

AJ: Yeah.

AY: And sort of informs the character.

AJ: Yeah, especially in comedy.

AY: Especially in comedy and especially in television where it’s a long developing role, and you’ve seen that in, in a lot of the stuff that I’ve worked on, stuff with Mike especially. but you look at how Nick Offerman informed Ron Swanson you look at how Chris Pratt informed Andy Dwyer and all of it, all of the actors on that show – but as you’re doing 20, 30, 40, 50, 100 episodes, you would be a fool not to draw from the characters experiences, and then that’s how it was on Master of None too and then and these are all sort of shows in the same family. But yeah, I mean those characters are just the actors on some of these shows so you just pull from them, their assets (?)

AJ: I know, I agree. And always in TV you find new faces, just don’t even – just find the new faces and the payoff is much, I think much bigger creatively and also for an audience.

MEJ: It keeps it from being one note I suppose, you can – especially playing someone dumb or you know an __ character like a grumpy separatist (?)

AY: But yeah, the specificity makes it real, right. The specificity makes it real and the realness makes it funnier, because there’s nothing better than the real stuff, man! There’s nothing better than the real life experiences, so I like meeting with actors and talking with them about their lives and it really informs a lot of the stuff I have written.

AJ: I try to have the role fit the actor, not the other way around. They don’t try to squeeze the actor into what they have in their head, they’re open to – I mean they ____ and Larry David and ___, Alan Yang, and Aziz (?) and Mike Schur and Greg Daniels, it happened in the past – in the casting and the pilot as well, they see what they have there and then how they can work them into the role, vice versa.

BH: Exactly.

AJ: They don’t care about line readings, they want someone who is going to be good to write for., who’s sort of fascinating to watch, and who’s just inherently funny – in any different way they find funny, inherently funny.

AY: We write, we write to the person.

AJ: Like William – yeah.

AY: We write to the person.

AJ: William Jackson Harper is not funny in the way Ted Danson is funny, but he’s funny.

MEJ: In a completely different – I think about Will that you, you believe he’s having a stomach-ache.

AJ: Oh god, yeah!

MEJ: He’s not playing – it’s not, it’s not something he slips into, like he looks tortured.

AJ: His agony is… yeah.

MEJ: He looks, yeah, his agony is palpable through the screen and –

BH: And while the roles of Chidi and Tahani and Janet, the – you know, those were all three had such stiff competition, but it’s very difficult to imagine anybody else now.

MEJ: Forget it.

BH: Yeah.

MEJ: I mean –

BH: You can’t imagine it.

AJ: Bad Janet is everyone’s favourite character.

MEJ: Oh, I I hosted an Emmy panel of – the other day and never got to this but on my list was to say that I adore D’Arcy, I love janet, I love love Bad Janet.

BH: Yes.

MEJ: I mean for her to get to sink her teeth into something like that…

BH: And I’m sure the writers love writing for Bad Janet.

AY: Idiots and mean people are always, always fun to write, yeah.

MEJ: I think it was in the episode of season 2 that you directed that we did a no– Shawn and Bad Janet did a no-look high five hand slap, that was pretty amazing.

AY: Oh yeah that’s right, we did a couple of oners too, that was fun. I remember getting Marc to do that.

MEJ: Pretty great. Alan, do you share Mike’s hatred for Florida and Arizona?

AY: I don’t know what’s up with that, man, I don’t know what’s up with that@ I think it’s, it’s fun because Florida’s one thing, but also just jokes about Arizona, you don’t just – you don’t just see that many of them, so it’s nice to, to get that, although I did watch this other thing this other day where Charles Barkley was making fun of the food at the Phoenix Suns Arena, it was very, very specific but yeah, no… I – it’s, it’s funny you know, like, ‘cause you, you wanna – I feel like one thing you wanna do is, is play some jokes where there ain’t. You know, ‘cause like Arizona jokes, but – Florida jokes may be lower hanging fruit but it’s, it’s more fun to do original jokes than to play on well tread ground.

MEJ: I feel like the audiences imagination could fill in some blanks after the pilot about how bad a character on earth Eleanor Shellstrop was. Was it difficult – what are the things did you consider, how did you arrive at her ditching her duties as a designated driver over and over again in these flashbacks?

AY: Yeah, that was a real push-pull ‘cause that’s the kind of thing that a writers room is good for, I think, because you wanna hear people’s opinions on how far to push the line, and you know that first season I think I always was pushing for Eleanor to be a little worse, a little worse, a little worse, you know, ‘cause there’s, there’s more comedy that way. You want – you know, also for the eventual twist where you want her to be really bad, so… But Mike has a really great instinct which I think was borne out in Parks and Rec and, and somewhat on The Office too you know, where he has this fundamental humanistic sort of optimistic generous view of humanity that I think comes through in all of the shows he’s created, and I, I honestly – like that has been influential on me as well. I’m a more optimistic happy person, as is all these guys now and so, so that comes out a lot but it’s not always comedy comedy, you know.

MEJ: Right.

AY: It’s the common thing to do in comedy, is to make your people real asholes.

BH: If they’re despicable, they’re despicable.

AY: Yeah, exactly, and it’s just, it’s just some… Somehow its, it’s a little easier to write sometimes to make people good people, so that I don’t know, there’s always a push and pull in the writers room about how far to push the line, right. It’s the same like how dumb do – do we make Andy on Parks or you know, it’s like that kind of thing where, where you talk about it.

MEJ: There’s a fun bit on the bottom of this episode 1X2, where it appears as though she’s learned her lesson and is cleaning up the neighbourhood in secret by herself, and then of course she’s instructed Bad Ja– instructed Janet to put the garbage in in someone else’s – Antonio’s bedroom or whatever.

AY: Yeah, yeah.

MEJ: Pretty terrible. Eleanor struggles to be a good friend to Chidi, as you will hear in this clip.

WJH: Tell me one fact that you know about me – and we spent the whole day together, you must remember something. What country am I from?

KB: Is it racist if I say Africa?

WJH: Yes! And Africa is not a country. I am from Senegal. Do I have any siblings, where did I go to college?

KB: Trick question, you didn’t.

WJH: I was literally a college professor! Do you not remember one single thing about me?

KB: Dude, things have been nuts around here! I bet you don’t know anything about me.

WJH: You were born in Phoenix, you went to school in Tampa, you were an only child, your favourite show was something called The Real Housewives of Atlanta and your favourite book is Kendall Jenner’s Instagram feed.

KB: How did you know all that?

WJH: Because you are constantly talking about yourself! You’re the most self-obsessed person I’ve ever met!

KB: You should see Kendall Jenner’s Instagram feed.

WJH: Okay, this is my fear about you, Eleanor. You are too selfish too ever be a good person.

KB: Well, I think you’re wrong1

WJH: What country am I from again?

KB: Sen…sodyne.

WJH: That is a brand of toothpaste.

MEJ: This clip comes from episodes found on Amazon, Google Play and iTunes, and watch recent episodes on the NBC app. Did you receive promotional consideration from Sensodyne toothpaste?

AY: Lifetime supply, baby! It’s just every day, grab it for lunch and dinner, Sensodyne.

MEJ: It’s such a, it’s got to be such a fun puzzle to try to you know, have her try to improve and fail so miserably over and over again.

AY: Yeah I mean that’s another thing that I think Mike is really skilled at doing, is you want there to be change in the characters but you can’t progress them so rapidly that you’re left with nowhere else to go, and one thing I think he’s been really good about doing is having characters grow and change over the course of the season, and then still having room to progress and that’s really difficult, and I think, I think season 1 you know they, it just – the plot moved, it moved really quickly and that is not easy to do so.

MEJ: It’s got to be difficult to accomplish because as you say you want them to progress not too fast but you still want to be ahead of the audience, you want to surprise them.

AY: Yes, and there are a lot of charts and graphs in the writers room.

MEJ: Is that right? How many writers are there, who’s in the room?

AY: Man, season 1 got… man, I can’t even remember, like 10 or so…? I could be wrong, I don’t remember how many exactly it was, some 8 to 10, something like that probably, and there literally was a graph of a chart showing the 4 main characters and, and just how they were torturing each other and because of the eventual twist that they were in the Bad Place was oh , how is each one specifically torturing someone else and there’s a lot of talk about you know, circles of hell and all that stuff which is really crazy. I don’t think it happens in a lot of sitcom writers’ rooms.

MEJ: Oh, I’d imagine that.

AY: Lot of talk about Aristotle and Jeremy Benthan and John Stuart Mill, John Rawls…

MEJ: And did you have any background in this prior?

AY: …so it was a lot of fun. I took a class or two in philosophy in college but I didn’t remember any of that. Who remembers what they did from college? I was a biology major, I don’t remember anything, so yeah.

MEJ: I would guess that Mike Schur remembers a lot of things from college.

AY: He was reading a lot of books, man! He was reading a lot of books, that bother. He gave me some packets, I was like, ‘yeah, I’m gonna read these.’

MEJ: What goes into casting the afterlife and when you’re, when you know at this point in the show’s trajectory, we all believed that that was indeed the Good Place and it was you know, a utopian society full of frozen yoghurt, so you want it to look like planet Earth presumably. What… what were you offered as guidelines for that?

AJ: Funny.

MEJ: Okay.

AJ: Funny and my – Ben’s and my instincts are always to go with people who could do more than what they’re given in the first episode, because these people do come back.

MEJ: Sure.

AJ: And they all sort of have a comic identity. Susan Park has her own identity, Amy Okuda has her own identity, Steve Berg, all good improv people, all – definitely good improv people, John Hartman, the one who plays the, the guy asking her for money in a flashback and she says smell my farts or something…

MEJ: Eat my farts.

AJ: Yeah, eat my farts, great because they have a lot of reactions to do as well, which is hard to do and everybody that Mike seems to pick that we like brings in – including yourself – is a great reactor as well, which I think also helps Kristen and Ted but it also defines the character and the afterlife. I think it was all sort of, I of course probably didn’t remember as much as Ben did, that they were actually demons.

MEJ: So you did know that at least.

BH: We knew.

AJ: Yeah, we knew, and I guess I, I knew and with a few lines somebody who can make a difference and somebody who is cheerful looking I literally really truly – cheerful looking…

MEJ: Yes, of course.

BH: Well, I think at this point –

AJ: ‘Cause Jorge and Steve both a cheerful couple, yeah.

BH: All, all – I mean Susan Park and Amy Okuda, I think, they are funny was first and foremost, I think. Second, at this point, the audience doesn’t know yet that they’re demons, right, and so I think we were looking – or I think Mike was probably looking for the, the positivity and you know levity.

MEJ: This happens later, but he definitely hits it with Tiya Sircar, you know she comes in and saying like, ‘Chidi don’t!’ then when he goes, ‘Vicky, stop’ like, she can turn and be like, ‘aw man!’

AJ: Yeah, definitely.

MEJ: It’s really satisfying.

AJ: That’s what D’Arcy can do.

MEJ: Oh, for sure.

AJ: Even in like episode 3, where she just – Michael had told her not to be flirty with somebody and she turns all pouty and nasty, it was hilarious.

MEJ: Yeah have, have you found that improvisation is something newer for the past ten to fifteen years in casting? That like, it, it’s a different skill set, it like –

AJ: 100%, yeah.

MEJ: It’s, it’s fairly recent, right?

AJ: I would say since I started working with Judd (?)  Judd sort of brought that into the fore in my, you know, career, I would say that used to be you could deliver a joke and if you went off the lines, people were horrified.

MEJ: Right.

AJ: Like, oh my god, he can’t remember the lines!

MEJ: That was the case in my – I’ve lived in Hollywood for about 17 years and I can remember I came from the second city, I came from an improv background and I would spice things as I saw fit and some people would go, ‘did you, were you handed new pages?’

AJ: Yeah exactly.

MEJ: In a ‘how dare you’ sense.

AJ: Yeah I was never – I never thought that was gonna transpire until I was doing one pilot where Amy Sedairs who was from (?)  Chicago and she ad-libbed and she was funnier than anything that was written, and the late great Chris Thompson said, ‘I like that girl. She’s funny.’

MEJ: Yeah.

AJ: And I was like, ‘but she didn’t stay within the lines!’ ‘Nope, she’s funny.’ And she got the part and that was probably 25 years ago, but I think Judd with the onset of hiring people like Steve Carell where they’re funnier than anything anybody could write definitely stated the trend, in my minimal casting section. Now everybody should – everybody wants to know if they can improvise, and most people can.

MEJ: Right, that’s so interesting.

AJ: In comedy.

MEJ: And I’m thankful for it because I think it does – and I can tell you as an actor, it’s a quicker way to showing the writers and producers and directors what I might bring to the role. Forget what’s on the page right now, but this is who, this is how I find funny and here’s something I hope you can rewrite to – at some point.

AY: Exactly and, and tying back to what we were talking about earlier about writing towards the actor, certainly for the larger roles on Master of None, we would have, we would do the scenes and then we would just have a scenario and say like, ‘okay you are hooking up with Aziz and the condom broke, now just improvise this scene and just do it for 2 minutes, 3 minutes, and…’

MEJ: See what you find.

AY: Yeah, exactly, see what kind of person that is, and then if you end up casting them like we ended up casting Noel we just hung out there a lot and tried to rewrite for her. So I think that’s just so valuable because you just know more about the person. It’s not, it’s not the case with every role, you don’t need it for every role necessarily, but sometimes if you got those – also if you got those Gatling guns, use them! You know you would be a fool not to let them go in some scenes, you know they don’t do it in every scene but some of the scenes where it’s like, ‘hey let’s do one where you guys are a little looser and you know they give us stuff that we again, could never have come up with on our own.

MEJ: In the writers’ room, did you have a lengthy and epic conversations about what heaven might be like? What perfection might be like, because I don’t know, that I feel that must be very universal because it definitely strikes a chord with me. I would love to fly.

AY: Yeah I think flying was always up there. .It was at one point – I believe the episode was going to be about gardening, and we were like no it’s not going to be gardening that’s crazy that’s –

MEJ: That’s not heaven.

AY: Yeah exactly, so whatever, it’s flying, everyone wants to fly so yeah I think there are some pretty… Look, the, some of the difficulties with a show like this where your world-building is man, there, there – because there are no limits, you can really talk about it forever. It can be anything so… so that in some ways, sometimes the constraints help you, right, because you can just spiral off into madness and so yeah I mean, totally.

AJ: Art direction and set direction. I mean, kudos to their art director…

MEJ: Crazy, right.

AJ: Yeah, oh my gosh, yeah. I would love to live in the place where they live.

MEJ: Me too.

AJ: I would love to live in – I would even take –

MEJ: A clownhouse?

AJ: Yeah the clownhouse, no, I would, I would…

MEJ: You mean the town square.

AJ: Take a lot of Jameela’s furniture – Tahani’s furniture, for sure.

MEJ: Oh I mean it’s (an) epic mansion.

AJ: Yes but as opposed to most television shows, this one is really a product of some incredible visual imagination.

MEJ: And Mike talked about that in the last episode of this podcast, to say that it was important to them – as in the writers room – to exploit the infinity possible, you know, that they wanted everybody to be in stripy clothing, to have giraffes walking through, and madness – shrimp falling from the sky because you have that ability so pull that trigger.

AY: Yes, it’s a kind of like the problems of the premise right, if you’re gonna do a show like this, you know, make use of what you have, otherwise it would just could just be another show of people sitting in an office or friends hanging out watching TV, so…

MEJ: And I think of another example of the brilliance of the balance in the show is that you have that you know, unlimited anything that you want and then the specificity of Eleanor’s thing that brings her joy being people puking on rollercoasters, or that you know, cups – to go cups where the lid fits so tightly it doesn’t leak at the seam, like that’s so earthbound and specific.

AJ: That’s my favourite thing in the show in three seasons, because like I come out of my favourite coffee place, Go Get ‘Em Tiger, and I have drips of coffee all here and I’m like, why can’t they figure out a coffee cup where the water doesn’t leak out when you drink it? It pisses me off.

MEJ: Right.

AY: I would say this –

AJ: And I thought that was genius – was that your thing?

AY I would say this – I don’t think that was, but there’s, but it is you know, a good balance of observational and absurd, right. Like you want, you want the imaginative stuff and you want the real granular Seinfeldian observational stuff so – by the way, great shoutout and slam of Go Get ‘Em Tiger.

BH: Yeah, that was what I was about to say as well.

AJ: Exactly.

AY: You love it, and hate it.

AJ: Yeah, but also for example, great slam and shoutout of season 8 of Friends too.

AY: Yeah.

AJ: That stuff is what’s great about that show.

MEJ: Another thing that I love about this is that early on establishes so much about Eleanor, I think that she is a person who would say ‘in my defence…’ and then say something about herself completely damning. You know like, ‘in my defence, I did it ‘cause I’m selfish’ right, ‘cause basically you know she kind of comes off as…

AY: Very little self-awareness. Also by the way, very different from Kristen Bell in person.

AJ: Oh yes, yes.

MEJ: For sure.

AY: That’s an example of a character being different from real –

MEJ: She is, she is fairly saintly.

AY: Yeah she is, you know she sets a good tone – her and Ted both really are just, just being super professional and generous and kind and you can’t say that about everybody, so really want to shout out those two. No slam, just a –

BH: No slam, only positive (?)

AJ: I want to shout out to you, Marc.

MEJ: Please.

AJ: Just as a as a (?) to Mike Schur’s appreciation of humour, you tested for – and I didn’t know you until we tested for the cop role…

BH: Brooklyn Nine-Nine.

AJ: In Brooklyn Nine-Nine pilot and you were outstanding, and it was another thing where he talked and he chidi-like talked and talked and talked, ‘do we go with Joe or do we go with Marc, do we go with Joe or do we go with Marc?’ Either way – and he, he basically extrapolated what your character would become in the first couple seasons as a cop and what Joe would become and he went with Joe for whatever reason but –

MEJ: Because Joe is Charles Boyle. I mean, it’s like he’s the Chidi of the – like there is no other way…

AJ: Exactly, but then he started using you all the time.

MEJ: Thank you, yes.

AJ: He did not remember you, and you were one of the rare things that comes in: someone who’s – you were not known before, you were in your early 30s or mid 30s and you freaking killed it.

MEJ: Thank you.

AJ: Yeah but it was a totally different version of the character.

MEJ: I would tell you that, that’s true, I tested for the role opposite Joe Lo Truglio for Charles Boyle on Brooklyn Nine-Nine and did what I can do like, that character was written as kind of sad-sack, kind of slobby. I am C3PO and cannot do that, it would be foolish for me to try.

AJ: And he said that that you were the opposite of how he thought of that role.

MEJ: Right, Mike Schur wrote the kindest email to my then-manager and said, ‘Just want to let you know, Marc couldn’t have done anything different or better, this – he, you know, was just 180 degrees from what, how the character’s written but we kept bring–‘ Like, and my manager wrote, forwarded it to me and said, ‘I don’t get these a lot.’ Like, Mike’s a special type.

AY: Marc, you are Mike’s, you’re like Mike’s favourite actor, you’re in everything he’s ever done. I’m pretty sure if he did a movie next year, it’s between you and Daniel Day Lewis, he’d be like Marc, man, Marc’s my man, Marc’s my dude…

MEJ: I’m certain. What movie are we doing next year? I’m available, I’m available.

AY: I don’t know, I bet he would though, I bet he would, man, he loves you.

MEJ: Oh that’s so kind, thank you.

[What’s good?]

MEJ: Thank you all so much for being here today, we like to finish off with a segment that we call What’s Good, something that makes you happy, a charity you support, the feeling of otters holding hands, that sort of thing. Anything come to mind and – something positive, something optimistic, something Mike Schur.

BH: My little niece, Mary-Ann (?)

MEJ: Oh that’s nice, how old is she?

BH: She just turned two.

MEJ: Very cool. Has she chosen a college?

BH: She… They’re, she’s between Harvard and Yale.

MEJ: Oh okay, she can commute (?)

BH: Let’s see if Alan Yang has anything to say.

MEJ: For you, anything come to mind?

AJ: Yeah, the instance where in the Harbour (?) fires just north of California recently, and that man jumped up and down and risked getting on fire himself to save the bunny.

MEJ: That little bunny.

AJ: That killed me.

MEJ: There was a video.

AJ: I thought that guy was heroic.

MEJ: It was on a roadside, he had gotten out of his car to rescue a wild hare right?

AJ: He couldn’t prevent himself, he saw the little hare in pain and he rescued it.

MEJ: I love that.

AJ: Yeah.

MEJ: Alan?

AY: I guess something way more indulgent (?) We were talking about – right before we started the podcast, there’s a restaurant in downtown LA called majordōmo that my friend Dave Chang does and Ben was talking to me about it so… yeah. Go there and get the lamb or get any of the large __(??) dishes, make yourself happy.

BH: Yeah, that –

AY: Do something good for yourself.

BH: Treat yourself.

MEJ: Allison Jones, Ben Harris, Alan Yang, thank you so much for being with us.

AJ: Thank you Marc Evan Jackson.

AY: Thank you very much.

MEJ: This has been The Good Place, the podcast, I’m Marc Evan Jackson. Now, go do something good.

[Closing music]

DC: Hi there! The podcast is over. I think what I’m feeling is… sadness.

TD: Oh, don’t worry Janet! This podcast is the most perfectly engineered invention since the paperclip.

DC: Fun fact, the man who invented the paperclip is in the Bad Place. For tax evasion!

TD: It’s available on Apple Podcast, and all major podcasting platforms, or wherever you get podcasts.

DC: Stop saying podcasts!

TD: Hosted by Marc Evan Jackson.

DC: Produced by Graham Ratliff (?).

TD: Written by Lizzie Pace.

DC: Music composed by David Schwartz. Yay!

Ding!

what’s good?

majordōmo 

A restaurant in LA serving California cuisine inspired by the different food cultures present in Los Angeles and the bounty of Southern California products. Located in 1725 Naud St. Los Angeles, CA, 90012.

[thegoodplacepodcasts-blog]

Ch. 1: Michael Schur

Ch. 1: Michael Schur.

Featuring the voices of host Marc Evan Jackson (MEJ) and creator of The Good Place, Michael Schur (MS). Intro and outro features D’Arcy Carden (DC) as Janet, and Ted Danson (TD) as Michael. Clips from 1X1 of The Good Place include the voices of Kristen Bell (KB) as Eleanor Shellstrop, and Ted Danson (TD) as Michael.

Ding!

DC: Hi there, I’m Janet. Welcome to The Good Place, the podcast.

TD: Janet, what is a podcast?

DC: It’s like the radio but there’s no music and literally anyone can do one at any moment about any subject. And, there’s a billion of them!

TD: Sounds great! Hope you enjoy this week’s episode!

[Opening music]

MEJ: Hello everyone, welcome to The Good Place podcast. I’m Marc Evan Jackson, I play Shawn. First things first, there will be spoilers from the first 2 seasons of The Good Place on NBC, so if you haven’t seen Seasons 1 and 2, stop listening immediately, do not read a single word about the show, and go bac and watch those episodes on the NBC app, Amazon, iTunes and GooglePlay. Out guest is the creator of the good place, Mike Schur. Mike Schur, welcome!

(read the full transcript below) 

MS: Oh thank you!

MEJ: Everything is fine.

MS: [Laughter] If only that were true.

MEJ: When you set out to create the most by the numbers cookie cutter uh, rehashed element of American network television, uh, where did you begin?

MS: [Laughter] Uh… I don’t know, I don’t know whether I should answer that as the bait you are intending it to be, or for real.

MEJ: Bait.

MS: Bait, okay. Uh, okay. I was just like look man, let’s just go right down the middle. Let’s just – let’s just, nothing too fancy, nothing too crazy, let’s just knock 100 of these suckers out and go home.

MEJ: 13 at a time. Only 13 at a time. [Laughter] I’m making reference to a bit(?), a conversation that Mike and I have shared many times on set, which is when I began as Shawn, we would find ourselves between takes going like, I have just received the information of what the show was –

MS: – Right…

MEJ: Because it hadn’t aired yet and it was all very secret, and then of course in my initial information of the show also came the twist that happens in episode 1X13.

MS: That’s right.

MEJ: The Holy Motherforking Shirtballs. So between takes, I was shell-shocked and (?) and was sitting there going, “Are you sure this works? “

MS: Yeah.

MEJ: This is a very unusual half hour of American network television.

MS: The answer to that question is – was no, and remains no. I’m not sure that it works. But the very funny thing that happens – so I knew because you had been on – you had been on Brooklyn Nine-Nine, and before that you had been on Parks and Recreation, and you had uh, you been in other shows that I’ve worked on, and we asked you to play this part where you were playing essentially like a demon – the worst demon right, the head demon guy. And the day that you were showing up on set, I thought oh no, I gotta – I gotta tell Marc real quick. I gotta go tell him, explain what the show is. And so I went to your trailer and I came in and I said, “Hey, do you know what – do you have any idea what is going on in this show, and you were like, “No I don’t”. And in that moment I realised like for the 40th time of what would – will eventually be like 500 times, like, “Oh no, I need an hour. Like I have to – I need an hour to explain to you what’s is happening.” Because not only do I have to explain the original premise of the show, and everything that had happened up to the moment you were going to enter the world of the show –

MEJ: – Correct –

MS: – I then had to explain the future of the show.

MEJ: Yes.

MS: And so you sat there as I as – I was like, “Okay let’s go back for a second here, here’s the beginning.” And I watched – it’s very fun, it’s very fun on this show to do this. It’s like, it happened with Tiya Sircar who played the Real Eleanor in Season 1.

MEJ: Real Eleanor, later uh…

MS: Later Vicky.

MEJ: Vicky, yes, of course.

MS: So I, it was a similar thing where it was like – we had her audition in with this, she was this saint who had been you know, we had – we had a read…

MEJ: Saving orphans.

MS: Saving orphans and doing like all this amazing stuff, and then I brought her all the way up through like… you know, the very – almost all the way to the end and then stopped, and then like later had to have to have her back and to say like, “Okay, everything that you did was a lie.”

MEJ: [Laughter]

MS: And so it is a very fun experience. I mean it was, it’s less so now obviously because we are two years in, but at that time it was so funny to go into your trailer and try to explain, in 12 condensed minutes what the hell was happening.

MEJ: Parenthetically, I will just let the listeners know, there had already been a knock on my door prior to your arrival that was some, uh, the base camp PA saying to me, “There was a van waiting for you to take you to set.”

MS: [Laughter] So, yeah like…

MEJ: So it was –

MS: The clock was ticking.

MEJ: Truly abbreviated, you got to the – you sat down and said I’m about to give a great deal of information.

MS: That’s right.

MEJ: You super did.

MS: Yeah. [Laughter]

MEJ: And then at the end, you took a breath and you said, “Do you have any questions?” And my first question was legitimately, “They let you make this? Like, are you certain this works?”

MS: Yeah, I know. But you know the interesting thing about what I go back to – the beginning of it, the only way to… The only way this happened, there were two things that made it happen. Number one is that the network said foolishly to me, “You can do whatever you want.” Like after Parks and Rec ended and Brooklyn (Nine-Nine) was on the air, they basically said, “We’re going to put 13 episodes of something on the air and you can do whatever you want.” Which is obviously an incredibly rare thing. It’s a wonderful thing, it’s a lovely thing, it’s rare, it-

MEJ: It feels like a mistake.

MS: Yeah, it does, yeah. It feels like an error, an unforced error on their part and they – they said that – and what happened was because they had said that, I sort of felt this weird responsibility. I felt two responsibilities: one to them to do something good, to thank them for their largess, and then the other was to do something really weird and different, because how often in anyone’s life does one get the chance to do anything he or she wants with impunity? And so instead of just doing a sort of, you know I had been – at that time I had done like, 12 straight years of some version of goofballs in an office, it’s – I started on The Office and then Greg Daniels and I did Parks and Rec together and then Dan Goor and I did Brooklyn Nine-Nine together. So I had been doing sort of office comedy for like a dozen years.

MEJ: Great ensemble cast who love each other.

MS: Great ensemble cast, yeah, but fundamentally based on Earth.

MEJ: Right.

MS: Based in reality, and so when someone says, “Okay, you can now do whatever you want,” I sort of thought if I could do whatever I want, then I should do… whatever I want! I should take that to heart so that was the – those were the impeti (impetus?), or the beginning of this.

MEJ: At what time did getting outside the box of an ensemble cast within an office become – expand to involve the afterlife? Where did that process come from and what was your own conception of what happened next?

MS: Oh ho, just two little questions for –

MEJ: I’m gonna be here in my own little corner…

MS: It was a very organic and natural-like development process in which I just, it was a thing that interested me, that I had never written about, but I had sort of thought about like what… what if the beginning of it was like, what if it’s like a video game – what if life is a video game where you’re going around and you’re, you’re winning or losing points in every action, and what if at the end of the end of the day where your time is up, your scores is calculated and the people with the highest scores go zoop [up] and the people with the lowest scores go, zoom [down]. And then that led to like, okay, well that that’s a… That’s a very sort of money-ball universe, right? That’s a universe that’s like, ‘look it’s not personal, it’s not…

MEJ: – It’s stats.

MS: It’s just stats and (7:15)

MEJ: It’s ____?

MS: (7:23) That’s a really obscure reference for anyone who –

MEJ: They’ll get it.

MS: Yeah.

MEJ: [Laughter]

MS: But – so that – and then it sort of unfolded naturally. Well then, what kind of – like how are those points calculated, what is the morality of the universe, who’s deciding this, what does it all mean, and then it just slowly started unfolding from there and my own – my own – to answer the second question briefly, my own conception of the afterlife was essentially nil at the time, in that I’m not a personally religious person. I’m not deeply religious, I was exposed to a lot of different kinds of religion growing up, I don’t know that I ever took to one specifically, but I think that’s good. I was sort of a blank slate coming in, and when I first started working on this show I read a lot of religious conceptions of the afterlife which are fascinating, all of them are fascinating. They have a lot of overlap, they have – there is a lot of big promises… Big promises there –

MEJ: – Oh for sure.

MS: Uh…

MEJ: The streets are made of gold…

MS: Yeah, that kind of thing, so those were all really interesting, but after I read about all – I spent like 4 months reading nothing but the religious conceptions of the afterlife, and immediately thought, oh this is pointless, because this is not a show about religious conceptions of the afterlife, this is a show about an ethical conception of the afterlife. So I junked all that and started on a crash course of philosophy – which I had a little bit more exposure to, but not much, and I just started like, consuming philosophy and ethics and that’s where we are today.

MEJ: When you say a little bit of exposure you were talking about undergraduate…

MS: Couple of college classes, and as a personal sort of hobby slash interest. I would occasionally read things of an ethical nature, articles or – or you know, just random things. I – I enjoy reading the ethesis column (?), it’s literally at that level. I like to say I have a roughly speaking Wikipedia level understanding of ethics, and it has since grown since I have been immersed in it for a couple of years now, but that was the – the switchover from religion, from reading about religious conceptions of the afterlife to reading about ethics was kind of the key point in the development of the show.

MEJ: Now it does not escape my attention that you said, “At the time I did not have – I had a nil conception of the afterlife.” Has that changed in the – since we began?

MS: I don’t know, I wouldn’t say it has, honestly what I have… I don’t know that I believe or don’t believe anything more or less about the afterlife now than two years ago. I do believe that I have a much greater sort of interest in and feeling for ethics and – and the just the kind of like, day to day, live your life decision making process that humans are literally forced to dodo – like, we don’t have a choice.

MEJ: A… a moment –

MS: Yes. If you – if you choose not to engage in ethical thought, that in itself is an ethical decision, right? So you’re just choosing to ignore these decisions that you have to make…

MEJ: – That presumes that you are aware of those decisions.

MS: True, but ignorance of the law is not a defence against – a defence against illegal activity.

MEJ: [Laughter] You’re on your guard.

MS: I had an interesting as– One of the more interesting corners of ethics that I wandered into was: there is a group of people – not a group of people, there are some thinkers, some philosophers who believe the moral choices that humans have to make every day are so awful and so terrible, and put you under so much stress and strain and sadness –

MEJ: Mmhmm.

MS: And they further then say, and when you didn’t ask to be brought into this world, you didn’t – no one said, “Would you like to participate in human activity or not”, you were just born, right –

MEJ: That happened.

MS: And they believed that because of those two things; because you did not have a say in whether you are a human, and because being a human is so morally twisted and awful, that it is immoral to decide to have children, and the only moral action that the human race should make is to stop procreating and die off.

MEJ: Mmhmm.

MS: So you can get into these really fun, weird – like, well here’s the natural conclusion of this kind of thought, right, and that to me, that is – that’s the stuff that I – that I have a deeper understanding of now, and a more nuanced understanding of all these different kind of approaches to whet to – to answer the question of what it’s like to be a human being on Earth.

MEJ: That sucks.

MS: [Laughter]

MEJ: That’s pretty terrible.

MS: Yeah.

MEJ: And that’s season three, you’re saying…?

MS: [Laughter] It’s a comedy show, remember? So you probably won’t get into that, but it is – it is shocking when you – you come to these guys and these come to really shocking conclusions about the mo– about the human condition and they are – at the very least I find them all fascinating to read about.

MEJ: You have created one of the smartest, dumbest show on television, where philosophy and fart jokes often share the same paragraph.

MS: That’s correct, yes.

MEJ: Are those two sides of who you are as well?

MS: A 100 percent, yes, of course. I mean – like that… the… Before the we started – the writers started working on the first season, I wrote a list of 6 things on the wall that every episode had to do, and number 1 was, is it funny. Because we were like, well it is a network comedy show, right, and if it’s not funny, we are blowing it. So we started with – so number 1 was, “Is it funny”. My number 1 fear is that people watching this show would suddenly feel like, ‘Why are you just lecturing me on how to live my life’, that is not the point of this show at all. The point of this show was to raise questions and – and we need to do that in a funny way, so if the episode wasn’t funny, if there wasn’t enough comedy in it, it would go away. So to answer our question of course those are two aspects of my personality but also it’s a specific goal of this show to never seem like we are just being like it was a – like it’s homework.

MEJ: Sure. I think this show does that really successfully I feel like the – I think you and the writers are really… Definitely able to say quickly, and… and within dialogue, here are the rules as humans, we have these choices to face, we have ‘A’s or ‘B’s and you know absent the sort of __ like, why do you make these choices.

MS: Right. Number 2 is if the characters are being developed. It was a huge deal for season 1 because there were these – we had these flashbacks, these were the moments that – knowing what we were going to reveal at the end of the year we had to explain by the time we got there, we had to have explained to the audience who these people were, and essentially why they ended up in hell. That was the big thing and if you… if you didn’t understand why all four of them were being tortured, then it was going to seem like a rand– then the twist would seem random, it would seem like, “oh…”

MEJ: Information laid over the mantel (??)

MS: Yeah, exactly.

MEJ: Which could have been anything  

MS: Yeah and – and… and not – it had to be properly set up in the usual suspects way, where like you… When you think back on it, you were ‘oh from the very beginning they knew exactly where they were going’, so that was number 2 – were the characters being developed. Number 3 was, does the episode ask and answer a question about ethics, about good or bad behaviour, obvious reasons for that. Number 4 was, was it compelling. We had this – I had this real fear we would seem like we were spinning our wheels. This was something Damon Lindelof talked to me about, because I consulted him a lot before while I was working on this show in the early days, and one of the things he said about when they ran into trouble on Lost was when they felt they weren’t – they were spinning their wheels, they were just like adding new characters and, and like kind of, you know, running in place and you get an episode like Jack gets a tattoo in Thailand or whatever, and it’s like… You’re like, well that’s not compelling. This show has to be endlessly compelling and full of momentum in order for it to… feel vital and interesting. Number 5 was, is it consistent with the long game, right, we couldn’t do – the long game being they were all in hell, they’re being tortured – we couldn’t ever do anything that would… that would seem like it was – that it contradicted the big picture, the big secret picture. So it was literally – we were literally at the level like you couldn’t ever see Michael – Ted’s character – alone you can’t ever see him, because if he were alone he would be… He would not be in character, right, he would –

MEJ: He would be evilly chuckling

MS: He would be evilly chucking and laughing hysterically at all the foibles (?) that the humans were undergoing, so we had all these really specific rules of like, is there any moment in the entire show where – when if you went back and looked at it, you went ‘well this moment doesn’t make any sense’, which was hard but fun, and then the last one was, are we making use of this premise. Basically like, we set this show in the afterlife. If we didn’t have one insane thing… a dog flying into the sun and exploding, or…

MEJ: Teacup.

MS: Teacup. Or something that – or something magical, something insane, Janet popping in and out, something that was… you were like well, this couldn’t happen anywhere but in the afterlife, if we didn’t do it at least once in an episode, we felt like, well we were blowing it. So that was the six things we feel that every episode had to do.

MEJ: I… I think you have a bright future in television.

MS: [Laughter]

MEJ: At what point did you – so I think it’s interesting to realise, this was a good show before episode 1X13 when all of our minds were blown and the carpet was pulled out from all – from underneath each of us. At what point in your conception of it did you decide, ‘oh I’m going to press reset at the end of Season 1 and undo all or most established reality…’

MS: It was part of the pitch of the show, yeah, so I had the idea to do this like… money-ball heaven calculation videogame kind of stuff…

MEJ: Mmhmm.

MS: And then I thought, the fun of this… The premise of the pilot was a woman gets put in the upstairs when she belongs to the downstairs and she’s like, ‘uh-oh, I’m in trouble.’

MEJ: The original title was upstairs downstairs.

MS: [Laughter] That’s right, and then I got sued for some reason…

MEJ: That’s strange.

MS: So I was like, oh, that’s good, that’s strange, a woman who wasn’t good hiding in plain sight amongst all people who were amazing, I was like okay but that – premises in TV especially burned off real quick and then you’re left with ‘what’s episode 4’, so before I committed to that premise, I thought, ‘well where could it go’, and I thought well, there’s this guy who is a moral philosophy professor who’s supposed to her soulmate, and she goes to him for help and he gives her lessons and okay, that’s something that could get me couple episodes, but then every time I would sort of manoeuvre around and sort of play it out, I would get to a point where I was like, and then what, and then what, and then what. Like it’s just – she’s just hiding over and over and over again, she’s almost getting caught, she doesn’t get caught, she figures her way out. I actually – one of my all-time favourite shows is The Shield and if you watch The Shield, Vic Mackey – Michael Chiklis’ character –  he was a corrupt cop and he was always almost getting caught and the – Shawn Ryan. the writers of the show had this insane ability to over and over and over again – for him to write scenarios where he would wriggle free, he would find loophole, backdoors, he would sneak away, frame someone else and it never got old and for a while, I thought, well, if they could do It in a drama, I could do it in a comedy.

MEJ: Right.

MS: And for a while, it was going to be that. It was just going to be, she constantly was almost getting caught, she wriggled free, and then I – again when I played it out, it just sounded boring. It just sounds like, and after –  audiences are savvy and after the seventh, eighth, ninth, twelfth, fifteenth time she wriggles free, you’re just going to be bored, so and I thought, wait – what if the whole point with – she’s not wriggling free, she’s – a guy, there’s a puppet master letting her wriggle free because that was torturing her that was the – and that was the beginning of it, that was the ‘oh wait a second, now I get it’, now this whole thing is it’s a… I – at the beginning it was like a, it was just an accidental trip to heaven and like, oh no that’s No Exit. It’s a really advanced No Exit – a Sartre play about the 3 people who were trapped in hell forever and they all had – and in No Exit, they all have very specific personality traits that drive two or one of the other one insane and miserable. There’s a woman who is really vain and she doesn’t have any mirrors, and there’s a guy who is a coward and… and he can’t bring himself to sort of make a move on the pretty woman and the – one of them is a lesbian and she is furious that there is no – that she, you know if you’ve read that play. It’s a wonderful play, it’s a very famous play, and as soon as it became No Exit in my head it was like, oh now – and now it all makes sense, because now I fool the audience into thinking that they understand what’s happening, and if I make the audience think, ‘oh, I get it she’s just going to constantly wriggle free’ and then at the end it’s like oh no, you were being tricked by the puppet master.

MEJ: And of course the whole thing is heightened and… and further spurred along by Eleanor’s confession, she then has co-conspirators in the form of Chidi, initially who is facing a tremendous moral dilemma of, “do I out this person or do I help this person?”

MS: That was a huge, a huge – a realisation was, and this came actually from talking to Ted Danson about it at the beginning, that there was a huge… Ted was like – Ted really loved the premise and he loved the show and he’s really excited about it but he was sort of like, “I don’t know what I’m playing until the end, until the twist, like I’m just playing… I seem to be just playing the same thing,” – which was a guy who is like, so happy about his creation, who is worried that there’s something wrong with it, that’s really fun to play but after a certain point it becomes like, the same thing over and over again, and I was like, you know, he’s totally right. And then I started to think – the same problem that was going to plague me in the original premise was going to plague me with his character, which was he – as the sort of like architect of the neighbourhood was going to be doing the same thing over and over again and so then I thought well, then the answer was to change the dynamic. So halfway through the year instead of her almost getting caught and wriggling free, out of nowhere halfway through the year, she will confess and now everything changes, and now Michael gets to play a totally different thing, which is, oh my god, who are you, how did you get here, all that sort of thing and all that stuff is now out in the open, and then that – then it became well, then you go back and you look at the whole year and you think to yourself everything was going really great for Michael. He was torturing everyone real– his crazy experiment was going really well until somehow, Chidi got to her enough where she confessed, and then it all fell apart. And then like, big chunks of the story just kind of fell into place as soon as we found out we shouldn’t wait for the end of the year for something interesting to happen. It’s a good lesson in general, right? Do something interesting earlier than you thought you were going to.

MEJ: I mean… I feel like this podcast as a podcast could end on that note, that’s a beautiful – that is… You talked about Ted, how… at what point in your mind, did Michael become Ted Danson? At what point was Eleanor Shellstrop, Kristen Bell?

MS: It’s a good question. I mean we never – I never talked to anyone else about either of those two roles.

MEJ: Wow.

MS: So I – It was like it was a – the, as archetypes, they were as – as perfect like, platonic ideals of characters. Those two were the first two choices. I talked – I knew Kristen, Kristen and I met when we lived in new York in 19– 2001 or something, she was doing theatre, I was at SNL, and we knew each other then, and I’ve, sort of seen her occasionally, and I – we remained quasi friends for a long time. She’d been on Parks and Rec a bunch of times. So – and I heard that her show might be ending, House of Lies might be ending and I felt, well, man, like there’s no one in the world I can think of who can play a like, a like… A likable a-hole better.

MEJ: Ashole .

MS: That’s right. She’s uniquely charming as a – as a human being, she is uniquely charming.

MEJ: Indeed.

MS: And so I had – I brought her into my office and I said, “I’m going to tell you a story, and I’m going to pitch a show to you, and this characters yours if you want to do it. If you don’t, no harm, no foul, we won’t stop being quasi friends…”

MEJ: Right.

MS: …and just told her the whole story, and then she was like, “Alright, I’m in”, and then it turned out crazily that she and Ted were friends – which I didn’t know –

MEJ: – I didn’t know that either.

MS: They had done a movie together called Big Mira– Big Miracles, I think it was called, it was a movie about the whales trapped in the ice in Alaska years ago, and yeah, they’d done a movie together and so when I met with Ted – which was a… for me personally was like a highlight of my career because I just am the biggest fan – he said, who are you thinking about for Eleanor and I said, I’ve talked to Kristen Bell about it and he like swooned, like she’s the… like, ‘I love her’… They had just gone out for dinner a week earlier or something, totally coincidentally. So it felt – a lot of times in my experience, when things are like – when the universe seems to line up to help you sometimes, like it – sometimes it does the opposite.

MEJ: That’s true.

MS: And then it’s just like the monkey and Donkey Kong just throwing flaming barrels at you, the universe is, and then somethings it’s just hey you – it’s… Everything’s going to work out and that sequence of time, from the time when I like, started telling people the idea through those two signing on, it was like, oh my, everything was working out perfectly, and the other – the last key was getting Allison Jones, the casting director, to sign on to fill the rest of those roles because there is no one better on earth at what she does –

MEJ: she’s fairly skilled.

MS: [Laughter]

MEJ: And she has a good rolodex (?), is that sort of thing…

MS: Yeah. Well, yeah.

MEJ: Let’s talk – we’re going to talk to Allison in one of these episodes of the podcast, to talk a little bit about that. But I’m curious, briefly, your take on some of the casting of the other roles of the ensemble. The one that stands out immediately is the role of Jianyu, or Jason – Jason Mendoza. That had to be an interesting task, because it had to be someone we would believe as a silent monk at first.

MS: That’s right.

MEJ: So it couldn’t be a known actor, had you put Eugene Cordero or someone better known in that, I think the audience would have sniffed it and said, “That guy speaks I have seen that guy speak before.”

MS: “I know who that guy is”, yeah.

MEJ: Right.

MS: It’s like when you’re watching like, a thriller and there’s a known actor playing a relatively minor part, you’re like, well that guy’s the killer.

MEJ: Straight Law and Order.

MS: Yeah, no, that was a big… There was a very specific set of criteria for all – each of the other four actors, and they were… It was like, for casting directors it was an obstacle course, it was like okay, we need to find an East Asian or Filipino, preferably, unknown man, who is both a wonderful silent film actor…

MEJ: Yes.

MS: And also a skilled comedian who can play a dumb guy from Florida.

MEJ: Right.

MS: That is not an easy thing to find. And the same is true of Tahani, the description was Indian or Pakistani-born, flawless upper-class British accent, also very tall, which – that was key she, had to be very tall.

MEJ: Because you had already written the giraffe lines.

MS: Because – well, no, the idea was for Eleanor’s nemesis – once Kristin signed on, it was like, well, who is Eleanor’s nemesis? And Tahani had already existed, but I altered it to be… like, I need to find the perfect person that specifically Kristen Bell would be, would feel is like better than her. It’s a key part of Eleanor’s personality profile, that – what makes her the most upset was that people – when she perceives that other people think they are better than her. So Tahani had to be tall and glamorous, it was described as in one set of sides as sort of Indian or Pakistani Grace Kelly.

MEJ: Oh, wow.

MS: That was the idea. So we were like, well, good luck Allison Jones, go find this and then one week later she was like, well we found her and her name is her name is Jameela Jamil and so that –

MEJ: Not an actor at the time.

MS: Not an actor.

MEJ: A BBC presenter.

MS: That’s right, a BBC – just like, a host, she would go out with a microphone and interview people to – like, “Hey”…

MEJ: At which she is enormously skilled, have you seen any of it?

MS: Yeah.

MEJ: She's phenomenal.

MS: So it was like –

MEJ: She should be hosting this podcast.

MS: [Laughter]

MEJ: Aw man!

MS: It’s not too late, we can start over and just junk all this.

MEJ: [Laughter]

MS: Anyway, the point is that those… Those character descriptions, I mean, just think about Chidi’s character description. He was a Senegalese ethics professor who also went to American schools, but speaks like five languages, who is tortured by indecision… The – the really fun like, the – the most fun part of casting is dreaming up insane people and wondering if they are out there and then find –and then getting someone to say, oh I found him, I found her, here she is… And, by the way, it should be noted – and this is how good Allison is in all of these cases –what I do with her and this comes – she also cast Brooklyn Nine-Nine and she also cast Parks and Rec and she cast The Office, I always say the same thing to her, which is, “This is what I have in mind. There is obviously flexibility here, if you find a person who fits every profile or piece of Tahini, except that instead of Indian or Pakistani-born, she is from South Korea or she is from Lima, Peru, or whatever, that’s fine. We can – we’ll, we will rewrite all the unimportant things if we get the important things, and then the amazing thing is you never have to do that, because she always finds the person you’re looking for.

MEJ: She certainly did it, and you certainly did it because the cast is amazing. Which brings us to Janet, both as a character and as an actor, like that’s a – the rules for the neighbourhood, the number of participants that – Janet in the neighbourhood, where did some of this things some from?

MS: So Janet in the original from, the very in the original outline that I have, Janet was a kiosk. It was a… It was a sort of place where, it was like a storytelling device, an information delivery system which was when Eleanor needed something, she could go to like a kiosk and just like, press a button and talk to essentially Siri, right.

MEJ: Right.

MS: And she would say like hey, is there someone in this neighbourhood named this, or is there someone here who is an ethics professor who can teach me about ethics, and a voice would emerge and it was like KITT from Knight Rider…

MEJ: Sure.

MS: And it would be a… Like yes, there is a person and here you go, and here he is, he is over here, go see him, and it’s like a weird quirk of the writing process, but it took me like months to figure out that it would be more interesting if it were played by –

MEJ: A human being.

MS: A human being, yeah. So then it was like, this is so much more fun. It’s just a – and y’know what? We auditioned more people for Janet than any other part.

MEJ: Fascinating.

MS: And the people ranged – one of the, like, just as some examples, we – we auditioned people in age from 14 to 70, I think.

MEJ: My goodness.

MS: And one of them was J.J Totah, who is now on the show Champions, he’s a young actor he’s on the show Champions, in the Mindy Kaling and Charlie Grandy show and he was in – J.J. is like, at the time he was like 14 or 13, and he was in the room waiting with D’Arcy and so D’Arcy looked over at him and said, “I’m not getting this part, like, what is happening…”

MEJ: Right, ‘this is strange’.

MS: But it’s because we just didn’t know – the number of possibilities for that role was so massive that we were just like, literally here is the character description: anyone on Earth, and so it took a really long time to figure out – in part because I didn’t, and still don’t, at some level 100% understand Janet. Like, I talk to D’Arcy all the time. D’Ar– one of the biggest reasons D’Arcy got the part is because she has an extensive improvisation background.

MEJ: Mmhmm.

MS: And I sort of said to her at the beginning, “We are going to figure this out together. Like, we're going to… it’s going to be trial and error, you’re going to try things with Janet that we’ll say no, that’s not right, and you’ll try something else and we’ll say no, that’s not right”, and we’ll just triangulate how Janet is and how she behaves and what, what she is, and we – and that’s why a lot of her jokes are her telling people what she isn’t, like it’s – it’s, someone referred to her as a computer –

MEJ: – Not a robot.

MS: Not a robot, not a computer, not a girl, not a woman. It’s because we kept on saying like, we’ll, we’ll define her by what she isn’t, and it’s a – it’s a crazy thing to do, but because she’s so skilled as a performer she’s managed to create this character where like even if you can’t quite define it, you get it. Like when you see Janet do something, you know that’s either something Janet would do or would not do. That’s all D’Arcy.

MEJ: It’s pretty fascinating. Her… her flip side, bad Janet also has to be fun to conceive of and write for.

MS: [Laughter] Yes, wonderful and also like, so fun to give D’Arcy, again, a different thing to do. I mean, some – a lot of ideas like that just come from like, we’re underutilising – like, she’s so good as Janet, but also she’s not getting to like, show off her skills. Like we… when we had Adam Scott on the show playing Trevor, a terrible, terrible demon –

MEJ: Right.

MS: The fun of it was, I got to call him and say, “Do you want to play the opposite of Ben Wyatt, like you have been –“

MEJ: Oh, that is fun, yeah.

MS: “– Like I’ve been writing for you for five years at that point on Parks and Rec as like this really wonderful, kind-hearted gentle person…”

MEJ: An optimist.

MS: An optimist and he has – if you have seen the movie Step Brothers, this completely other gear that he can shift into and be so funny and so I got to call him and say, like, hey come play anti-Ben Wyatt and he was like, sounds great, so that – bad – things like bad Janet come from things just like, we have a performer who has, who is like a transformer that has not been allowed to transform into the robot or whatever it is so it was like, alright, go nuts.

MEJ: That was a fascinating conception. You’ve been very egalitarian in not establishing any religion as being completely right. There is one special person that we’ll hear in this clip.

KB: So who is right? I mean, about all of this.

TD: Well let’s see. Hindus, a little bit right, Muslims a little bit, Jews, Christians, Buddhists… Every religion guessed about 5%. Except for Doug Forcett.

KB: Who… Who is Doug Forcett?

TD: Well, Doug was a stoner kid who lived in Calgary during the 1970s. One night he got really high on mushrooms, and his best friend Randy said, ‘hey, what do you think happens after we die’, and Doug just launched into this long monologue where he got like 92% correct. We couldn’t believe what we were hearing! That’s him actually, right up there. He’s pretty famous around here. I’m very lucky to have that.

MEJ: Who… who is the actor or person who plays Doug Forcett, and how did that come into being?

MS: That guy, we're - we're like, who should be Doug Forcett and that guy is Noah Garfinkel. He's a writer, he worked with my wife at New Girl for many years, and he's the best friend of Joe Mande, who's a writer on the staff, and he just... The – the description was a stoner in Canada in the 70s, and Noah's hair was absurd and floppy and he looks like a Canadian stoner so we were like yeah, there you go. What we didn’t anticipate that was so fun was the placement of the painting – or photograph – would mean that Noah, who was not an actor at all, would be in essentially every bit of promotion of – for this show for a year and a half plus. Like he was every shot of that office, he's just standing right over Ted Danson's shoulder. The most wonderful thing was at the end of the year when we were shooting 1X13, we were shooting the Bad – in the building downtown – it’s the bad place sort of HQ...

MEJ: Mmhmm.

MS: And it was one of the last days of shooting, and Noah came to the set, and when he walked onto the set, Ted Danson reacted like Bono had shown up.

MEJ: I was there, it was amazing.

MS: Yeah, right? And it was like, he’s posed for pictures and it was like, and then he hugged him, and Noah came up to me and was like, "What is happening? I don’t understand my life right now!"

MEJ: Yeah, Ted Danson is one of those people who in the – in the shooting in the first season, he and I sometimes would be hiding behind the pocket clown doors in Eleanor's bedroom, y'know, waiting to make an entrance, and we would be having a nice conversation because he's an absolute delight. And I would come to my senses and realise like, I'm sitting on a bed whispering with Ted Danson, trying not to get yelled at by Kristen Bell because she can hear us as we sit here and giggle...

MS: Yeah.

MEJ: It was a little insane, and the fact that I had this experience just last week getting ready for this podcast, where the intros and outros were being voiced by D'Arcy and Ted and Ted Danson said my name in the credits, and like, that’s a thing!

MS: Yeah!

MEJ: 'Cause that’s Ted Danson.

MS: I have a – I have a thing that happens all the time where he calls me on my cellphone and I look at my phone and it says Ted Danson.

MEJ: Yeah, dude.

MS: And it's like, no, obviously it's not Ted Danson, who is it really? Who is it calling me?

MEJ: That’s phenomenal. As we were walking into the studio to record this last week, he said, so, you're hosting this and I said yes, and he said, are you hosting it as you, or as Shawn, and I said, come on, man .

MS: [Laughter]

MEJ: Like there’s not a – not a ton of blue sky (??) between those two guys and he said, "I know, sometimes I feel like I'm playing Ted Danson playing Sam Malone playing Michael."

MS: [Laughter]

MEJ: I said, hey man, if it works...

MS: Yeah, A, if it works, do it and, B, that’s he’s a... He's a very modest person considering the career he's had.

MEJ: He's really lovely.

MS: Yeah.

MEJ: I mean, he's – I think he’s got a bright future as well.

MS: Yeah.

MEJ: You developed a fun game of swearing substitutes. Eleanor finds when she arrives at The Good Place that she's not able to say words that she wants to say and is confused by it.

MS: Right.

MEJ: Was that simply because you were going to be on primetime network television?

MS: Yeah, it was a creative workaround for NBC FCC regulations, but I also - I liked it as a solution, because part of the premise obviously is that she is put into a place that seems like Paradise, and for her, it's anything but. And obviously that’s by design, it's secretly her torture device, but I like the idea that she would be constantly frustrated by not being able to express herself the way she wanted, and furthermore that the explanation for why that was the case is that incredible, good, kind, soulful, positively-charged people who were in that world collectively said that's the way they wanted it, which again feeds into Eleanor’s persecution complex. She feels like she's always – there's always people who feel like they're better than she is, and so for her trying to swear and not being able to because all the people who deserved to be in The Good Place have, are the kind of people who would never swear, and don’t like it when people swear. It was like 11 different levels of enjoyably torturous for her.

MEJ: Did Standards and Practices give you any trouble with your substitutes?

MS: They did not! They were very cool with it, I think they enjoyed the ingenuity a little bit you know, like they were sick of having battles where you know, as a writer you would try to get a dirty word through the censors, and they would fight you on it and you would say this other show did this and that and whatever, and they didn’t have to do that anymore. We were just saying the word 'fork', and there is nothing wrong with the word 'fork', even if the context in which were saying it makes it clear that you're using a different word.

MEJ: There’s a distinct rhythm to 'motherforker'.

MS: Yeah.

MEJ: That is unmistakably a substitute for something.

MS: Yeah, and I particularly liked 'shirtballs', like 'shirtballs' is wonderful, it's just two incredibly benign words put together that make that reference a really... a really un-benign word.

MEJ: This makes me think I remember of - I think it was from Amy Poehler’s book, her audiobook, you guested with her and talked about the conceptions of the names of substitutes. Other things you considered for Leslie Knope.

MS: Right.

MS: Shellstrop was another ridiculous last name, were there any other Eleanor Shellstrops that you –

MS: There were – there were a lot, I don’t really remember them, but it was just this weird thing where I realised her name couldn’t be Jane Smith.

MEJ: Right.

MS: That it was – like part of the, part of the way that she immediately knew that there was a problem and stuff is that she was like, oh I have this very unique name and someone else must have had the same name, if it were like – it seemed like it had to be kind of – and in order for, we’re pulling this... One of the parts of the ruse was the idea that these seemingly omniscient forces that choose this things had somehow screwed up, right, and so the part of what made it unlikely-seeming, and also inevitable, and also funny and all of those things was the idea that two - it wasn’t two Jane Smiths, it was two crazy-name people, and the way that the story unfolded is that two people named Eleanor Shellstrop were in the same moment, in the same time, and one of them is a good person who saved the other one's life by shoving her out of the way and - of this y'know, crazy accident and so the more specific it got the more – it needed to be really, really specific, it couldn’t be Jane Smith or else it would be kind of weirdly boring and sort of predictable or something, so I don’t know where Shellstrop came from it was just – I start sometimes, when I need to come up with names I literally – stick it with Lizzie who is sitting to my left, who works in the writers room, can attest to this, I just start typing letters.

MEJ: You’re describing your writing process as literally, monkeys at typewriters.

MS: Yeah.

MEJ: Eventually arriving at Shakespeare.

MS: That’s exactly right like instead of Shakespeare it’s the name Shellstrop, which I don’t think Shakespeare ever came up with.

MEJ: Goodness.

MS: [Laughter]

MEJ: Why do you hate Arizona and Florida?

MS: I don’t hate them, but they are insane places. Florida is insane, especially Jacksonville areas and a crazy – Jacksonville is, by area, I think, the largest city in America. It’s just a weird creeping virus that keeps expanding outwards because Florida, like Texas – where my family was partially from – has no zoning laws, so Jacksonville just keeps expanding like a disgusting fungus and –

MEJ: This is darker than I anticipated to hear from you.

MS: And – and by the way, come on, I mean, every insane thing that has happened in America in the last 50 years can be traced in some way –

MEJ: – To Florida

MS: To Florida. When I was at SNL actually, I wrote a sketch – it was a commemorative plate series, it was just Florida’s worst moments, it was like… At that time it was like Elián González, and then there were shark attacks every week, and then you know blah blah blah… Anyway, and then Arizona is like west coast Florida basically Arizona is insane. I mean, Sheriff Joe Arpaio (?) alone makes Arizona deserve a part of what it gets.

MEJ: Sheriff Joe (??)

MS: Yes, the “innocent of all charges” Sheriff Joe Arpaio.

MEJ: Chapter 1, the pilot airs. Was the reaction different that you expected?

MS: No, generally speaking… The reaction is very favourable. It is easy to get a favourable first impression when the first two faces that people see are Kristen Bell and Ted Danson as was the case.

MEJ: America’s sweetheart.

MS: America’s sweet– Two America’s sweethearts, so the feedback was generally favourable. There was a, a – something I was not used to was having to bite my tongue, right, because some of the reviews and some of the feedback was, well it’s an interesting idea, but there’s no way… where does it go, you know, and of course at that time we all knew where it was going, and so I was like – we did the TCA panel, you know, there was the Television Critics Association panel for new shows and the television critics have seen the pilot and they ask you about it and you answer questions and it had to be really tight-lipped and careful.

MEJ: Very embargoed.

MS: Very embargoed, yeah, and – but we’re also… The trick was we couldn’t say we have to be tight-lipped and embargo-ey about this, because we didn’t even want them to know there was a twist right at that time. It was a comedy show, it was just a comedy show with an interesting premise and so I was terrified – I think the reason why the twist was so effective in large part was that no one knew it was coming, right, it was like if, if you go into a movie, if you go now into an M. Night Shyamalan movie, you are… the whole time from the moment you see the trailer or hear the title, you’re like well, let’s figure out the twist.

MEJ: Everybody’s dead.

MS: [Laughter] So I didn’t even want people to know there as a twist, so we had to talk about it in an embargoed way, tight-lipped embargoed way without letting them know what is it that we were doing. It was a very dicey – Jameela likes to say now that she just – from the time she found out about the twist, anytime she talked to anyone – if anyone asked a question about the show, it was literally the level like, ‘is it fun being on the set with Ted Danson’, she would just like, clam up and run away ‘cause it was like, we were all so scared.

MEJ: Petrified to spoil it.

MS: That’s right, except for ted. Ted ran around and apparently told every single person –

MEJ: Is that true?

MS: Yeah, Ted, after the… after it happened, Ted said, “I’m so relieved because I told so many people,” and I was like WHY, and he was like well, what he said was that he would tell people about the show and he would explain the premise, and they would go, ‘oh that sounds cool’ and then he would kind of get angry, defensive and go, ‘no it’s more cool than you know, because here is what really happens at the end…’

MEJ: That’s a very natural instinct.

MS: Yeah.

MEJ: To go, it’s not some fluffy show about heaven.

MS: That’s right.

MEJ: Oh my goodness.

MS: So he apparently told 70 people.

MEJ: Now that said that audience likely knows this, maybe you do not – you didn’t tell the other actors playing Chidi and Tahani and Jason and Janet about this until… halfway through the season, more than halfway through the season, or two-thirds, maybe three quarters of the way through the season. There’s a fascinating video from you and Kristen Bell – Kristen Bell shot a video on her phone of you telling those actors what happens in episodes – I guess in episode 1X13.

MS: So yeah, we – I told Ted and Kristen, because I thought actors of their stature deserve to know what they are getting into, and if Ted – if I had lied to Ted Danson essentially by saying you’re playing an angel and later, I said guess what, you’re the devil and he didn’t like that idea, I would have felt bad. So I – the two of them knew, and the writers obviously knew, and some of the producers knew, but the other four cast members did not, and none of the guest cast – like I said Tiya Sircar, for example, didn’t know and so yeah… When – when I decided it was time to tell them, because we had committed to it, we had cleared it with everyone we needed to clear it with and we had decided it was the right way to go creatively, we sat down after like, a read-through for episode 10, I think, and told them and Kristen videoed it. You can see it on her – it’s on her, it’s on her Twitter feed for a while…

MEJ: I think it’s still – I mean, people wrote about it.

MS: Yeah.

MEJ: Please look it up, it’s hilarious.

MS: It’s pretty funny.

MEJ: And fascinating. I have watched it 1000 times.

MS: Well, the good thing was we – I was terrified at every stage that they were going to – that, that it was going to leak out, and I was further terrified that people were going to guess it en masse, like in the society we live in and the world we live in of entertainment, everyone guesses everything and so what I ran the – when I explained the ending to the four actors who were steeped in the show the most of anyone in the world, they were playing the characters on the show and they – I grilled them afterwards, I was like “did you see it coming? Did you guess this? Did any part of you…” blah blah blah blah blah and when they said no, it gave me a lot of confidence that we were actually going to get it to airing without anyone finding it out.

MEJ: I, unusual for this, read every comment on any website –

MS: Did you, really?

MEJ: I did, I went deep-dive, as we get to episodes 1X11, 1X12, just to see if anybody sniffed it or if anybody was looking for –

MS: And what did you find?

MEJ: Zero.

MS: Really?

MEJ: Exactly what happens in this show itself happens after episode 1X13, and the twist aired which was… A couple people were like, ‘holy cow I jokingly said this, you know, several months ago to a friend, what if this was all whatever but I didn’t mean it, I didn’t…’ Nobody – there was nobody online that said, “I knew it!”

MS: Right, someone told me that there was a Reddit comment – or a thread, even, that where someone was like, ‘so hey here’s my theory’ and then it kind of didn’t go anywhere, petered out, and then after that happened, someone wrote ‘hey that guy was right!’ And they went back and found that guy and that guy was like, ‘oh yeah, I did say that…huh.” He’d forgotten about it and moved on.

MEJ: Was that person named Doug Forcett?

MS: [Laughter] That would be amazing.

MEJ: Mike, will you come back? We have a thousand things to ask you and would love to talk more about obviously episode 1X13, one of the biggest twists in American television history…

MS: [Laughter]

MEJ: Take that, Lost! So many things to ask you, but one of the things that we’re thinking about doing is well, asking people about good stuff. What’s good, a charity you support, or something that makes you happy…

MS: Oh boy, there are so many things… Charity – I sup– I’ve gotten extremely into a sort of charitable giving, there’s a whole division of ethics that’s devoted to the idea of where one should spend ones’ charitable donations.

MEJ: Interesting.

MS: There’s a hardcore utilitarian named Peter Singer, who is a very famous philosopher in Princeton, and he’s pretty – He’s a little too hardcore for my taste sometimes, but his whole thing is, look, I first learned about him – this will take a second, I apologise – but I first learned about him… he wrote an article for the New York Times Sunday magazine years ago, where it was right after Warren Buffett had decided to give 30 billion dollars to the Gates Foundation, and he – and people were saying he was the greatest philanthropist in history, like, dollar for dollar the great – he’s going to be the greatest philanthropist in history, and Peter Singer wrote this article and said, no he’s the worst philanthropist in history because sure, he gave 30 billion dollars to charity, that’s wonderful. He also still has 30 billion dollars.

MEJ: Mmhmm.

MS: So imagine I told you, there’s a man who had 30 billion dollars and wasn’t giving any of it to charity. What would you think of such a man? You would think, ‘what a cheap bastard’, right?”

MEJ: Right.

MS: And I was like well, that’s a really interesting argument by Peter Singer – so he’s written a number of books that I’ve read, and number of articles that I’ve read, and his basic – his thing is, is: you need to be efficient. You need to like, say, okay look, I’ve a hundred dollars to give to charity, I love the orchestra…

MEJ: Mmhmm.

MS: I love the symphony orchestra, so I’m going to give a hundred dollars to the symphony orchestra. It’s good, perhaps, to think to yourself, ‘Well, symphony orchestras are lovely, they’re wonderful things’. However, right now in West Africa, there are children who are dying of malaria and they’re dying of malaria because they’re bitten by mosquitos that could – that are transferring malaria into their blood, and for about 4 dollars you can buy a net that can go over a cot at night that keeps mosquitos from biting children and killing them. So instead of giving 100 dollars to the symphony orchestra, it might behove one to consider saving 25 human lives by donating that money to a charity that buys mosquito-proof nets.

MEJ: Sure.

MS: And it’s – it’s like, a lot of things with utilitarian ethics, there’s a sort of slippery slope there. If you – if you completely devote yourself to that line of thinking, you end up doing nothing but spending all of your time in just – and resources – it’s what… It’s like a utility pump, that’s what they say, like you don’t want to just turn into a vessel for sending money and resources to other people because it’s not a verdant life you’re leading.

MEJ: Right.

MS: However, that line of thinking has become very interesting to me. So there’s a website that’s – givewell.org, that basically goes out and researches like, the charities that do – that stretch your charitable dollar the farthest, and you can go there and say like, okay, well here’s – they, they do a lot of really intent vetting and they make sure that everything checks out and that, all that – they’re using the money efficiently – and all that sort of stuff. And so what – at the end of the year when I decide where I’m going to send charity money that’s a, that’s one of the first places I go. Now, obviously each individual person has to decide what makes sense for him or her, in terms of what, you know, you want to support, but it is a cool thing about the modern world, that we now have websites like these where you can say like, if I wanna be the most maximally efficient about giving money to charity that – they – these people can help me figure out how to do that.

MEJ: Mike, last question. At some point a decision was made not to introduce the character Shawn until episode 10 of the 13 episode first season.

MS: Right.

MEJ: When the show is eventually cancelled, do you acknowledge that that will have been the reason?

MS: I would say that it’s far more likely that the reason will have been too much Shawn.

MEJ: Hmm. Agree… to… disagree…

MS: [Laughter]

MEJ: Mike, thanks so much for your time.

MS: Thank you for having me.

MEJ: Yes, and thank you for listening. This has been The Good Place, the podcast. I’m Mark Evan Jackson. Go do something good.

[Closing music]

DC: Hi there! The podcast is over. I think what I’m feeling is… sadness.

TD: Oh, don’t worry Janet! This podcast is the most perfectly engineered invention since the paperclip.

DC: Fun fact, the man who invented the paperclip is in the Bad Place. For tax evasion!

TD: It’s available on Apple Podcast, and all major podcasting platforms, or wherever you get podcasts.

DC: Stop saying podcasts!

TD: Hosted by Marc Evan Jackson.

DC: Produced by Graham Ratliff (?).

TD: Written by Lizzie Pace.

DC: Music composed by David Schwartz. Yay!

Ding!

what’s good?

givewell.org

A nonprofit dedicated to finding outstanding giving opportunities and publishing the full details of our analysis to help donors decide where to give.

[thegoodplacepodcasts-blog]

Introduction: Welcome! Everything is Fine.

Welcome! Everything is Fine. Featuring the voices of D’Arcy Carden (DC) as Janet, and Ted Danson (TD) as Michael.

[Opening music]

Ding!

DC: Hi there!  I’m Janet.

TD: And I’m Michael.

DC: And were here to tell you about the new Good Place podcast. A podcast is like a TV show, but you only hear the voices of the attractive people, which is not as good. But you can listen while you drive, so you know, pros and cons.

TD: Each podcast will focus on one episode of the hit NBC sitcom, The Good Place, giving you a behind the scenes view of the show through discussions with writers, cast and other people who worked on that chapter.

DC: It will be hosted by actor and amazing voice haver, Marc Evan Jackson. Fun fact, Marc is the 11th best voice of any creature in the world, the only better voices belong to James Earl Jones, Adele, and eight beautiful South American songbirds.

TD: You know the way you feel when you see a puppy becoming friends with a baby? That’s how you’re going to feel listening to The Good Place podcast.

DC: It is available on all major podcasting platforms, or wherever you get your podcasts. Subscribe today!

[Closing music]

TD: The Good Place.

DC: Hyphen, the podcast.

[thegoodplacepodcasts-blog]

Hi!

This is a blog dedicated to unofficial transcripts of The Good Place Podcast, for fans who may for various reasons, be unable to listen to and enjoy them, or just fans who don't do podcasts - or anyone in general, really. This is entirely a fan-made passion project and is not affiliated to, or funded by either NBC or The Good Place.

I’m currently aiming to upload one episode per week, but because this is currently a one-man show and I’m juggling this along with college, I hope you’ll understand if some episodes may be slightly delayed.

That said, if there’s anyone willing to help out (either in transcribing or editing, or in any other way, really), please feel free to drop this blog a DM, or email tgppodcastscripts@gmail.com, thank you!