Ted Danson And Kristen Bell Preview ‘The Good Place’
Ted Danson, known for his work on Cheers, Becker, and CSI, is joining Kristen Bell (Veronica Mars, Frozen) for the NBC comedy The Good Place, which previews on Monday, September 19 before landing on its regular Thursday night slot at 8:30 p.m. on September 22.
Kristen Bell plays Eleanor Shellstrop, a seemingly perfect and kind woman who died suddenly in a grocery store parking lot and ended up in the Good Place. (Some may call it heaven, but for this series, the celestial region is simply called the Good Place and hell is known as the Bad Place.) She is immediately welcomed by Michael (Ted Danson), the architect who built the neighborhood that Eleanor will be living in. She later meets Chidi (William Jackson Harper), who is her soul mate.
“Yes, it’s a real thing,” Michael tells her.
Everything is perfect except for one thing. Eleanor is convinced that they have the wrong girl. The Good Place is reserved for people who were the best of the best on Earth, and she knows that she was not that person. With Chidi’s help, Eleanor strives to be good before anyone else figures out that she is a fraud.
The executive producer of The Good Place is Michael Schur (Brooklyn Nine-Nine, Parks and Recreation, and Master of None), who got inspiration from Lost creator Damon Lindelof. Each episode “will have a huge, twisty, cliffhanger after it,” he recently told Time magazine. However, the inspiration for the show came while he was driving his child to school.
“It came largely from being at an intersection in my car and the light turning green and then people going the other way turning left through their yellow light to go back the other way from where I was going. In my opinion, two cars are allowed to do that. And sometimes there’s a third car, and I would get a little annoyed. But I would give them the benefit of the doubt and say, ‘Maybe your kid is sick and you have to get home and see your kid.’ And then sometimes there’s a fourth car and I’m like, ‘You’re a bad person. You’re putting your need to go left above the needs of all of these people to go straight and that’s not okay.’ So I started imagining that person.”
“That person” is Eleanor, who, while living on Earth, knew what the right thing to do was but ignored it.
“I do think you probably do know in every moment what the right thing is,” Ted Danson told the Tribune News Service while discussing his career and the show. “There’s some part of you that does. Then there’s the other part that will argue for practicality or money or fame — or something will be seductive. But there is a core inside of you most likely that knows what the right thing is… and it probably has something to do with being nurturing or kind or something on that side. It’s also kind of all miraculous. Who knows? You do have to have a lot of faith and it is a mystery, and that’s why we’re all here. You may know what the right thing is but you don’t DO the right thing all the time, constantly. But you learn from your mistakes. So you go, ‘OK, I didn’t listen to that part of me.'”
RELATED TV REPORTS FROM INQUISITR:
TNT To Air ‘Star Wars’ Marathon: Turner Wins Airing Rights To 11 ‘Star Wars’ Films
Holy Guacamole! Original 1960’s ‘Batman’ TV Series Returns To TV…In Spanish
‘Breaking Bad’ Creator Vince Gilligan Set To Work On ‘Raven,’ A Limited Series About Jim Jones For HBO
NBC’s #TheGoodPlace is unlike any comedy you’ve ever seen https://t.co/zlD1SDvhOT @nbcthegoodplace @KenTremendous pic.twitter.com/1RM9loqCXA
— TV Guide (@TVGuide) September 15, 2016
The Good Life is much different than anything else Schur has worked on. While clearly a comedy, he describes the show as being more sci-fi-esque, as some episodes feature flying shrimp, giant ladybugs, personal assistants who literally pop in whenever requested, lots of frozen yogurts shops, and falling garbage for seemingly no reason.
The Good Place features two back-to-back episode preview on Monday, September 19 at 10 p.m. The actual premiere is Thursday, September 22, and its regular time slot is 8:30 p.m.
[Featured Image by Justin Lubin/NBC]
