A good twist can change the fortunes of any story, both in good ways and bad ones. M Night Shyamalan is a masterful storyteller, and a very accomplished film-maker, but you probably remember most of his most famous movies for a couple of minutes at most. At the same time, great twists done well are such a talking point that they’ll always be part of a story-teller’s armory. And there have been so many in TV history that cataloging them all would be an impossible task. That makes it all the more remarkable that there’s one that stands head and shoulders above them all.
When Michael Schur’s sitcom The Good Place premiered in 2016, it presented itself as a wonderfully high-concept comedy about the afterlife. Its premise was simple and brilliant: Eleanor Shellstrop (Kristen Bell), a selfish and decidedly mediocre person from Arizona, dies and mistakenly gets sent to a heaven-like neighborhood designed for only the most morally righteous people in human history. After meeting the otherworldly Architect Michael (Ted Danson), Eleanor realizes she must hide her secret and learn to become a genuinely good person to avoid being discovered and sent to “The Bad Place.”
This setup was an immediate comedic goldmine, thanks to The Good Place pairing Eleanor with her supposed soulmate, the perpetually indecisive ethics professor Chidi Anagonye (William Jackson Harper). Plus, after learning that she’s an indisputably bad person, Eleanor is forced to navigate a world populated by insufferably perfect individuals, like philanthropic celebrity Tahani Al-Jamil (Jameela Jamil) and silent monk Jason (Manny Jacinto). Rounding out the cast was Janet (D’arcy Carden), an all-knowing celestial being with no sense of adequate human behaviour, managing the Good Place under Michael’s orders.
However, The Good Place quickly proved to be more than just a clever sitcom. While the laughs were consistent, the series also proposed a sincere exploration of what it actually means to be a good person. Eleanor’s secret ethics lessons with Chidi became the show’s engine, using real philosophical principles as the framework for her clumsy attempts at self-improvement. As a result, The Good Place established itself as a story about the deeply human struggle to own up to your past mistakes and put in the often frustrating work of becoming better, to yourself and the people around you.
All these unique narrative elements turned The Good Place into a funny, heartfelt, and surprisingly thoughtful series that seemed to have a clear and compelling trajectory, with Eleanor slowly improving herself. And then, in its first season finale, the show executed a flawless twist that blew up its entire premise and cemented its place in television history.
The Good Place Season 1 Twist Redefined Everything
The final episode of Season 1, “Michael’s Gambit,” sees the four human residents of the Good Place, Eleanor, Chidi, Tahani, and Jason, finally forced to face the music. After a season of lies, shenanigans, and existential chaos, they plead their case to a celestial judge, but their bickering and inability to get along only make things worse. As they realize they have been making each other miserable since the moment they arrived, Eleanor is struck by a horrifying epiphany. She bursts into laughter and declares, “This is the Bad Place!”
In a masterful heel-turn, friendly Architect Michael reveals the truth: he is not an angel but rather a demon, and this picture-perfect neighborhood is not the Good Place at all. It is a highly experimental torture chamber designed to make these four specific humans torment one another for a thousand years.
The brilliance of this twist is that it is not a cheap gimmick designed for shock value. Instead, it retroactively imbues every single detail of the first season with a deeper, more sinister meaning. The endless frozen yogurt shops were designed to prey on Chidi’s crippling indecisiveness. Plus, Tahani’s perfect mansion, always just slightly smaller than her neighbor’s, was a constant source of insecurity for her. In addition, Eleanor was surrounded by people she felt inferior to, while Jason, a failed DJ from Florida, was forced into a vow of silence as a Buddhist monk. Every seemingly quirky flaw, every minor annoyance, was a precision-engineered tool of psychological torture. The twist enriched Season 1, inviting fans to binge-watch the whole thing again to realize how the clues for the big reveal were hiding in plain sight all along.
The Good Place‘s Twists Offered Constant Reinvention
What truly elevates The Good Place Season 1 twist above all others is what the show did immediately after. The season ends with Michael snapping his fingers, erasing the humans’ memories, in order to start his experiment over with a “clean slate.” This cliffhanger suggested that Season 2 might be a simple retread, watching the characters slowly figure out the same secret all over again. However, the show subverted that expectation in the very next episode. The Season 2 premiere burns through hundreds of Michael’s reboots in a hilarious montage, with Eleanor and the other afterlife prisoners figuring out the truth almost instantly in each one. The showrunners refused to rest on their laurels, discarding the “do-over” premise within a single episode and forcing Michael to team up with the humans to hide his failure from the other demons, completely changing the series’ dynamic once again.
This act of narrative reinvention became The Good Place’s defining characteristic. Every season would unravel the status quo, pushing the characters and the premise into completely new territory, from returning to Earth to try again, to navigating the afterlife’s bureaucracy, to redesigning the entire system of divine judgment. Because of that, the twist in the first season can be seen as the moment the show revealed its true ethos. It was a promise to the audience that this would be a series about constant evolution, one that would always choose bold reinvention over comfortable repetition. In doing so, the show’s structure perfectly mirrored its characters’ journey, a relentless, often messy, and ultimately beautiful process of trial, error, and growth.
The Good Place is available to stream on Netflix.
What do you consider the greatest twist in television history? Share your pick in the comments.
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