We can expect new episodes of The Good Place to start arriving on Netflix UK on 27th September, as it premieres on 26th September stateside. The writing team went through a third existential crisis of their own as they tried to work out how to reboot the show again for season 4, after a twist in the season 3 finale that left many viewers ugly crying at their TV, Denofgeek reports.
As we're presuming you already know if you're reading this, the gang eventually decided to go with Chidi's heartbreaking plan to wipe his memories at the end of season 3 to make it easier for them to prove to the Judge that humans can change for the better, after the Bad Place sent in his old girlfriend to mess with his ongoing anxieties.
The memory wipe left Chidi with no recollection of falling in love with Eleanor, and finally finding happiness in the afterlife.
Season 4 will have 14 episodes, instead of the usual 13, and will wrap up with an hour-long instalment. NBC announced that it was extending its stay in The Good Place for another season. The season 4 pickup came with just four episodes left in season three, and that early renewal gave creator Michael Schur plenty of time to chart a new direction for a series known for major plot-altering twists.
Recently, it was announced that we should hug season 4 as tightly as possible, because it will be the end of the series: The Good Place has delivered a ratings success for NBC as its highest-rated comedy. According to Deadline, season 3 averaged around 4.6 million viewers in Live+7 ratings, and performed well in digital and time-adjusted viewership.
"It is a full, series-ending, wrap-up kind of a thing," creator Michael Schur told TVLine. "So it will have one gigantic story that will serve as the end of the series for everybody."
He went on to say that the fate of both life and the afterlife rests on Eleanor's shoulders, a heavy burden:
The new dynamic is that she’s pretending to be the leader of this little community, which is a job she doesn’t really like. [Laughs] Eleanor wasn’t a team-leader type of person. And to make matters worse, she has to put a smile on her face as she watches the love of her life not have any idea who she is. Those two things are very much linked, for obvious reasons. And then there are the massive stakes of the experiment itself: If it works, they save humanity, and if it doesn’t work, then maybe all of humanity is doomed. A lot of Season 3 was about personal dynamics. It was about Tahani and her sister, and about Jason and his dad and his best friend, and about Eleanor and Chidi. So we are now, in the final season, telling a lot of the ends of those stories, in addition to the end of the much larger plot story about the universe and how it judges people, and what it means to be a good or bad person. So everything is sort of dovetailing in the final season.
Schur previously teased that season 4 will have more in common with season 1 than ever, but that Chidi's wiped memory will probably lead to “different power dynamics” before adding that "the idea is always to change everything and somehow still do the same show that people have been watching. So hopefully, that’s what happens.”
He also confirmed that the The Bad Place will be sending another saboteur along to try and ruin Eleanor's plans, as they didn't know Chidi would be rebooted.
