The Good Place creator Mike Schur has announced that his otherworldly comedy series starring Ten Danson and Kristen Bell will be coming to an end with its upcoming fourth season.
“After season one ended and aired and it seemed like the show was going to survive the gauntlet of being a TV show in the modern era, I was like, ‘Well, this show isn’t a typical show where the goal is to do it as long as we can and as many episodes as we can,'” Schur tells THR. “It was never designed that way — we do 13 episodes per year from the beginning. I knew I needed to map this out in the same way that I mapped out the first season, I needed to map out the whole show. I didn’t feel like it needed to be definitive but I needed to have a sense of how long I thought the idea could sustain itself. I came to the conclusion pretty quickly that it was four seasons. There were times early on where I felt like maybe five and maybe it’s three.”
“Once I settled on four seasons, I didn’t tell anyone — except the writers. I didn’t tell the studio or network because I wanted to make sure that I was right and I wanted to leave open the possibility that as we as a team developed the show, I wanted to allow the possibility that something could change and there was more I wanted to do. But it was pretty much always four from early on as a general map… Toward the end of us shooting season three, I told the studio and then we told the network soon after that. It was completely dictated by the idea and how much juice I thought the idea contained and the pace at which we were letting story unfold and stuff like that. The nice thing about TV shows nowadays is it’s not a forced marathon. You can let the idea dictate the number of episodes that you actually do, which is great for creativity.”
Airing on NBC, The Good Place sees Kristen Bell as Eleanor Shellstrop, a woman who finds herself in ‘The Good Place’, a heaven-like utopia which strives to accommodate everyone’s specific tastes. However, it turns out there’s been a case of mistaken identity, and she’s actually been mistaken for a different Eleanor – something she has to try and hide until she can become a morally better person and earn a place of her.
