'The Good Place' Will End With Season 4, NBC Confirms

From Good Housekeeping

Everything is (not) fine. The Good Place will officially wrap after its fourth and final season, creator Michael Schur announced on Friday. The beloved NBC show starring Kristen Bell, Ted Danson, and new stars William Jackson Harper, Manny Jacinto, Jameela Jamil, and D'Arcy Carden, impressed fans and critics alike with its takes on philosophy, ethics, and Blake Bortles jokes.

However, now is the right time for the show to meet its end - according to its team of writers.

"Given the ideas we wanted to explore, and the pace at which we wanted to present those ideas, I began to feel like four seasons - just over 50 episodes - was the right lifespan," Schur wrote in a statement. "At times over the past few years we've been tempted to go beyond four seasons, but mostly because making this show is a rare, creatively fulfilling joy and at the end of the day, we don't want to tread water just because the water is so warm and pleasant. As such, the upcoming fourth season will be our last."

The good news: The cast is currently hard at work filming the final episodes, and they're dropping a few hints about what will happen in their version of the afterlife. Here's everything we know so far about Season 4, including the potential premiere date and spoilers about what exactly will happen to Eleanor, Chidi, Tahani, Jason, Michael, and Janet as they meet their eternal fate.

Is The Good Place coming back for Season 4?

Yes! NBC officially renewed the show for a fourth season back in December 2018. It will include 14 episodes with an hourlong series finale for a grand total of 53 chapters, Schur confirmed to the Hollywood Reporter.

NBC has not announced when the final season will air, but the past premieres have all occurred in late September. We're predicting the new season will come back either September 19 or 26 if the show is still slated for Wednesdays.

Is the whole cast coming back?

Yes, all of your favorites have definitely signed back on:

• Kristen Bell as Eleanor Shellstrop

• William Jackson Harper as Chidi Anagonye

• Jameela Jamil as Tahani Al-Jamil

• Manny Jacinto as Jason Mendoza

• D'Arcy Carden as Janet

• Ted Danson as Michael

Given the ending of Season 3, we're also hoping to see more of Adam Scott as Trevor, Tiya Sircar as Vicky, Marc Evan Jackson as Shawn, Maribeth Monroe as Mindy St. Claire, Jason Mantzoukas as Derek, Brandon Scott Jones as John, Kirby Howell-Baptiste as Simone, and Maya Rudolph as the Judge.

Are there any Season 4 spoilers?

Michael Schur and various cast members have dropped a few major bombshells in interviews since Season 3 wrapped up. Here's what we know so far:

The first episodes will revisit the Season 1 experiment. "They're going to repeat this grand experiment of Michael's neighborhood with new people and see what happens," Schur told the Hollywood Reporter. "Their wager is that any group of people, if given a certain amount of love, support, empathy, and help, can become better. That essentially no one is beyond rehabilitation. That's the first chunk of episodes: repeating this experiment with these new people and having our crew now shift from students to teachers a bit."

Season 4 will get a lot more emotional. "It'll really hit the heartstrings," Manny Jacinto told E! News. "In these later seasons we're kind of getting down to the emotions and really trying to get people invested in these characters and what they've gone through."

The show will play with new power dynamics. "We're starting in a very different place where the six of us are not all on the same page at all," William Jackson Harper told TV Insider. "So, it leads to some really interesting dynamics."

We'll find out more about "soul mates." The writers purposefully complicated Chidi and Eleanor's romance with mind wipes, it turns out. "We’re also trying to say something specific about the nature of 'soul mates,' which will be crystalized in the fourth season," Schur told Rolling Stone.

Eleanor will have someone torturing her specifically. "The Bad Place chose people who were specifically meant to smart bomb the four main humans," Schur said. "Tahani didn't know that guy John at all. She'd never met him, but he was there to torture her. In Chidi's case, Simone was actually someone that he knew ... Eleanor has another one on the way." That could include her dad Doug, mom Donna, or maybe someone particularly egregious from her sham pharma job.

The new four will not remember details that might interfere with the experiment. "The idea is, when the Judge gives them the okay to erase Simone's memory back to before she met any of the other four, and then Chidi decides to erase his memory back to the moment of the air conditioner falling on his head in his original timeline, all of the other people who might have any knowledge of his alternate timeline life/death would have those little memories erased as well," Schur confirmed to Rolling Stone

We'll find out what Michael really is. Schur also revealed we will learn "a lot more about Michael’s corporeal form" in the fourth episode of the new season.

The show will not end on a cliffhanger. "About halfway through you're going to see there's no way that this isn't the endgame," Schur told the Hollywood Reporter.

The final message will be positive. If you're adhering to the fan theory that there is no Good Place, don't expect a nihilistic twist at the end. "The main lesson of the show, in terms of ethics, is that the important thing is that you try and you're aware that ethics matter," Schur added.

How can I watch and stream The Good Place Season 3?

Great news: You can stream The Good Place online in a bunch of places. The NBC website has every episode from all three seasons and you don't need a cable provider to watch, although you will have to sit through a few commercials. Hulu also has Season 3 Episodes 8-12 if you need to a refresher on the most recent plot developments. Start a free trial here to watch ad-free. If you're starting from the beginning, you can also watch Seasons 1 and 2 on Netflix.

What has happened on The Good Place so far?

Warning: There are major spoilers ahead, so proceed with caution. Starting in Season 1, deceased humans Eleanor, Chidi, Tahani, and Jason have all just entered the afterlife - the utopic "Good Place" - complete with an omnipotent programmed assistant named Janet. However, both Eleanor and Jason quickly conclude they've only mistakenly made it to heaven because they both lived less-than-moral lives on Earth.

Eleanor enlists her "soulmate" Chidi to teach her and Jason how to improve themselves so they can actually earn their places. But in a shocking twist at the end of Season 1, she realizes that they're not in the Good Place at all, and that their immortal guide and "architect" Michael is actually a demon from the Bad Place secretly bent on torturing all four of them.

In Season 2, Michael repeatedly wipes the memories of the four humans in order to continue tormenting them, but each time the group figures out what's really happening. Eventually, his failed experiments back him into a corner with the other demons - and so he decides to team up with his since-improved subjects and appeal to the universe's "Judge" for them to actually go to the Good Place. Skeptical, she gives them a series of tests, including sending them back to Earth to try again, except Michael keeps meddling with their new lives in order to help his friends. In the midst of this, Michael and Janet realize that no human has entered the Good Place in the past 500 years.

When we left off in Season 3, Michael made a case to the Judge that modern life has made good deeds have more and more unintended bad consequences, making it impossible for humans to get to the Good Place. To test whether people could actually improve in a more neutral setting, the Judge agrees to yet another experiment: The four original humans will attempt to gain points once more in the Medium Place, along with four new humans selected by the Bad Place. The only hitch is that the Bad Place purposefully selected participants that would trigger the worst qualities in Eleanor, Chidi, Tahani, and Jason, including a gossip columnist named John who tormented Tahani, as well as Chidi's ex, Simone. To avoid ruining the experiment, Chidi asks Michael to erase his memories - meaning he's now forgotten all about his relationship with Eleanor. And oh yeah, Eleanor is now also posing as the architect due to Michael having a last-minute panic attack.

What are some other shows like The Good Place?

If you're looking for something else to binge until September, we've got you covered. Try one of these similar series:

Lost: Creator Michael Schur previously shared that he modeled The Good Place on the long-running '00s show about a group of passengers marooned on a mystical South Pacific island after a plane crash.

The Office and Parks and Recreation: If you haven't watched Schur's other NBC comedies, definitely give these instant classics a go. Find all seasons of both shows on Netflix.

Brooklyn Nine-Nine: Schur is also the showrunner behind this Andy Sandberg-led cop comedy that debuted on Fox and has since moved over to NBC. Watch the first six seasons on Hulu.

The Prisoner: This '60s British TV show follows an abducted former spy who is imprisoned in a mysterious coastal village. Watch it now with Amazon Prime.

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