“The Good Place” Has Me Imagining What My Afterlife House Would Look Like
In case you missed it, NBC’s The Good Place wrapped up its first season last week with a pretty unexpected finale. If you’ve been sleeping on this new comedy, now’s the time to catch up—even if it’s just to check out the set design. Come for the aesthetics, stay for the surprisingly solid philosophy jokes!
The Good Place is about Eleanor (Kristen Bell), a bad person who’s mistakenly sent to a section of the afterlife intended only for humanity’s best. The show’s idea of Heaven, and how anyone accumulates points in order to land there, is pretty hilarious overall – but a great gag throughout revolves around the housing situation there.
Each neighborhood of the Good Place is designed differently to accommodate the people living in it, although a theme that carries across all of them is the presence of multiple frozen yogurt storefronts. “People love frozen yogurt, I don’t know what to tell you,” the neighborhood’s architect Michael (Ted Danson) wearily explains.
Michael tells Eleanor in the pilot that, in the Good Place, everyone gets to live in a house that matches their personality and tastes. Eleanor skeptically eyes her tiny cottage (pictured above) and can’t help but compare it to the massive mansion next door.
“I just love your house, it’s so tiny and cute,” says her neighbor and frenemy Tahani (Jameela Jamil). “It’s like one of those Tinkertoy houses for a family of mice, or a very fancy little dog.”
Since Eleanor is only in the Good Place because she accidentally takes the spot of someone else, the house she winds up in was designed with a completely different person in mind. Michael beams as he tells her the house was decorated “just as you like it,” — in the Icelandic primitive style. The final touch is his enthusiastic presentation of an entire wall devoted to terrifying clown paintings.
Tahani’s mansion, alternately, features several columns and a fountain out front and multiple crystal chandeliers inside. She casually mentions the presence of 36 regulation-size tennis courts on the property while elegantly drinking from a gold leaf-rimmed wine glass.
“My entire house could fit in this room,” Eleanor points out from the foyer.
This super nontraditional show has me wondering what my house in the Good Place would look like. I feel like it would just be filled with a bunch of albums on shelves and extremely flattering lighting. There’d be cats chilling on every soft surface and a ton of signed Jenny Lewis tour posters on the walls. It’d also probably be a two-bedroom apartment in a mid-sized city, which is exactly where I live now.
Heaven is a place on earth, you guys! Dream big.