Ted Danson Says ‘The Good Place’ Writers Had Ethics Professors “On Speed Dial” For Accuracy; Deadline, November 9, 2024

Glenn Garner , Deadline; Ted Danson Says ‘The Good Place’ Writers Had Ethics Professors “On Speed Dial” For Accuracy

"Following his time on The Good Place, Ted Danson is giving it up for the show’s architects.

The 3x Golden Globe winner recently explained the lengths the NBC comedy’s writers’ room went to in order to more accurately depict its characters’ ethical dilemmas as they navigated the afterlife.

“On speed dial, we had three or four ethics professors who would talk to the writers daily to make sure what we were talking about was right,” said Danson on his Where Everybody Knows Your Name podcast, as co-host Woody Harrelson added, “Sometimes it’s good to get a second, third opinion.”

The Michael Schur-created comedy, which ran for four seasons from 2016 to 2020, starred Kristen Bell as Eleanor Shellstrop, an ethically questionable soul who mistakenly ends up in the titular ‘Good Place’ after her unexpected death."

Michael Schur On Ethics And Morality In A Crisis; WBUR, April 9, 2020

Meghna Chakrabarti and Brittany Knotts, WBUR; Michael Schur On Ethics And Morality In A Crisis

"How do you think "The Good Place" characters Eleanor, Chidi, Tahani and Jason would have responded to the coronavirus in their Earth lives?...

MICHAEL SCHUR, ON HOW JASON WOULD RESPOND TO THE CORONAVIRUS...

Jason: “Then there's Jason, who is just an idiot. And Jason, I don't know if you saw one of the craziest photos to me of all of the photos we've all been looking at, it was that county line in Florida. ... Where one county had shut down its beaches, and the other county had not. And so as a result, the beach was entirely empty. And there was just like suddenly just a wall of people extending further out, down the beach, because that county's beaches were open. Whatever county that is, that's where Jason would be. … So he and Eleanor probably wouldn't have been dissimilar in terms of the way they approached this, but for different reasons. Eleanor was selfish, and Jason was just sort of impulsive and didn't really think anything through.”...

What do we owe each other? 

Michael Schur: “I said before that there's a certain sort of minimum that is required of everyone, to the best of our abilities. The basics, right. Staying inside, staying away from people, trying to kind of stop the spread of the disease. But then beyond that, there's an enormous sliding scale, I think. If you have the ability to, for example, pay your dog walker, if you have the financial means to continue to pay your dog walker who can't walk your dog anymore, or someone who helps you clean your house, or anybody who works for you in any capacity. If you have that ability, I think you need to do that. And then, you know, you keep sliding up the scale. If you have the ability to keep people on the payroll at your business who are working for you, even if it means you lose money, I think you have to do that, too. And it just keeps going up and up and up."

4 Philosophy Professors Weigh In on Why The Good Place Is So Forking Funny — and Important; Popsugar, February 28, 2018

Gwendolyn Purdom, Popsugar; 4 Philosophy Professors Weigh In on Why The Good Place Is So Forking Funny — and Important

"There's a scene in the second season of The Good Place where, in order to illustrate the classic moral dilemma known as The Trolley Problem, the characters are forced to live it. The famous thought experiment, which asks different variations of whether you would steer an unstoppable trolley into one person to avoid killing five, has long been a go-to for ethics scholars — but watching the show's hilariously gory take on it brought the lesson to life in a way Agnes Callard, an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago, hadn't considered before. "There's something very violent about the thought experiment itself, like, we're asking them to imagine murdering people," Callard told POPSUGAR. "And the show just takes that really seriously, like, 'OK, let's reallyimagine it.'"

It's just one of the ways tuning into the NBC sitcom has been a fun first for philosophy and ethics professors like Callard, who aren't used to seeing their area of expertise at the center of a hit network comedy. Callard and the three other philosophy professors/The Good Place fans we talked to said that while pop culture has always reflected on philosophical themes, they don't remember a show or movie ever examining specific theories and works this explicitly."