There’s a great story behind creation of ‘The Good Place’

Michael Schur came up with the idea for The Good Place while in the worst place imaginable: stuck in Los Angeles freeway traffic.

The Good Place, a new NBC comedy starring Kristen Bell and Ted Danson, is set in a community that’s kinda sorta like heaven.

The rules for getting here are pretty straightforward: Do good deeds, you get points in your favor; do bad things, it means points against you. At the end of your life, the plusses and minuses are tallied on a cosmic scoreboard. Only the highest scorers wind up in the Good Place.

As for everyone else, well, it’s best not to think about those poor souls.

Bell plays a new arrival to the Good Place. But her character, Eleanor, doesn’t belong. She was a horrible person in her former life. She’s here thanks to a clerical error. Now she’s scheming to stay.

The show premieres at 9 p.m. Monday, then moves to a 7:30 p.m. Thursday time slot later this week.

Now back to Schur, the writer-producer whose previous TV credits include The Office, Parks and Recreation and Brooklyn Nine-Nine.

“The genesis of The Good Place came from driving in Los Angeles traffic, which I do not recommend as a way to spend your time,” he says. “I was constantly seeing people do awful things that frustrated and infuriated me.

“Like, someone would cut me off on the 101 and I would instantly think, ‘That’s negative five points, buddy.’ I didn’t necessarily know what I meant by that, except I had this vague notion that if there’s any kind of system for keeping track, then that guy’s karmic score just took a hit.”

The result of these musings is a TV series premise that’s unlike any other.

It’s also the kind of show that has the power to turn viewers into armchair philosophers.

“What we started to realize, the cast and the writers and the crew, is that if this were the system for getting to heaven, we’d be in big trouble,” Schur says. “When you think about how much you can do, if you put your mind to it, and how little most of us actually do, very few of us would go to the Good Place.”

Bell’s character points out that, while she wasn’t the best person, she wasn’t the worst, either. She reasons that she should spend the afterlife in a place for middle-of-the-road people. Alas, there isn’t one.

So she will beg, borrow and steal to stay in the Good Place. Or maybe she can change her ways and become worthy of living here.

Bell, formerly of TV’s Veronica Mars and House of Lies, was always Schur’s leading candidate to play Eleanor.

“The character is not a great person,” he explains. “She is selfish and rude and callous. I needed someone who could behave that way without turning off the audience. And Kristen can pull it off because she is one of the warmest and most inviting screen presences in the universe.”

Danson, of Cheers fame, plays Michael, the “architect” of the Good Place. He is the one Eleanor must keep in the dark about her true nature.

There’s also already an unlikely breakout star from The Good Place.

In the debut episode, Michael explains to Eleanor that no religion got it completely right when imagining what the afterlife would be like. “Every religion guessed about 5 percent right,” he says.

But Michael then adds that there was one guy, a Canadian stoner named Doug Forcett, who came close in the 1970s. “He got really high on mushrooms and got, like, 92 percent correct,” he says.

Meanwhile, in real life, the man who appears onscreen in a photo as Doug Forcett has become something of a cult star.

“He is my friend Noah Garfinkel,” Schur says. “He writes for the show New Girl. One day I called him and asked, ‘Hey, can we take your photo and hang it up on the wall in Michael’s office?’ He said sure and he came over and we took his picture.

“Three months later, the promos department used that scene so much that they almost made him look like a recurring character. Now he’s getting recognized by people on the street.

“Noah’s like, ‘How is this happening? I don’t understand.’ It’s a very funny thing that happened.”

This story was originally published September 16, 2016 at 2:22 PM with the headline "There’s a great story behind creation of ‘The Good Place’."