- Synced & corrected by MementMori - -- www.addic7ed.com --
- Hi. I'm Ted Danson. - And I'm Kristen Bell.
And tonight, we are on the set of "The Good Place"
to share some of the unforgettable times we had
while making this show.
I'm embarrassed to tell you I've just seen three store names
that I hadn't seen before. The Italian restaurant.
"Lasagne Come Out Tomorrow"?
- Yeah. - It's a good one. It's a good one.
This one's great. "Dr. Carl Emerson DDDS.
Dental Services. Just Kidding! Puppies!"
There are so many good jokes hidden
even in the set deck here.
I've loved working on this show with you.
- Me too. - I think...
- Me too. - Me too!
When we started, I had confidence it would be good
and that I would enjoy your company,
but I don't think I anticipated
how proud we'd be to tell this story
and how much of a family we would become.
Yeah, yeah. I agree.
I feel like we're having a conversation
that's really important nowadays.
It's about decency.
It's about the consequences to your actions,
and yet instead of tasting like medicine,
they sprinkle it with 9-year-old fart humor
and lots of visual magic.
- Yeah. - It's really special.
It's special. It's special.
And as we get ready for our fourth and final season,
we hope you enjoy the behind-the-scenes stories
and some of our favorite clips from the first three seasons.
Welcome to The Good Place.
Everything's fine.
B mark.
With the fourth and final season
of "The Good Place" on the way,
it's time to celebrate the critically acclaimed series.
How do you pump your fists again?
- Is this it? - So let's go back to the beginning...
They were looking for an overly tall,
annoying Pakistani Englishwoman, which is basically me.
... share some of the secrets from set...
Barely any work happens here.
Cobblestones suck!
It's mostly just snacking and playing.
- ... make a few immature jokes... - Ball test!
- Yes! - This is my bud hole.
It's just like a hole where me and my buds can hang out.
... and explain once and for all what happens in the afterlife.
Whoo!
Welcome to "The Paley Center Salutes 'The Good Place.'"
_
You, Eleanor Shellstrop, are dead.
Your life on Earth has ended, and you are now
in the next phase of your existence in the universe.
Cool. Cool. I have some questions.
I love all the questions the show poses.
I love just being able to ask those questions.
How do we all share Earth?
How are we supposed to live together? Are there rules?
Are there always consequences to your actions or not?
During your time on Earth, every one of your actions
had a positive or a negative value
depending on how much good or bad
that action put into the universe.
Every sandwich you ate,
every time you bought a magazine,
every single thing you did
had an effect that rippled out over time
and ultimately created some amount of good or bad.
Only the people with the very highest scores,
the true cream of the crop,
get to come here, to The Good Place.
What happens to everyone else, you ask?
Don't worry about it.
It's designed so that everything
they could possibly want is right there,
and they're all perfectly matched soul mates
so that everybody, when they come there, has a soul mate.
Come on in!
Eleanor, I'm Chidi Anagonye,
and you are my soul mate.
Cool! Bring it in, man!
Chidi, the ethics professor
who his entire life has tried to do the right thing
and find the right answer to literally everything,
upon meeting his soul mate,
she confesses that she's really not supposed to be there.
Somebody royally forked up.
Somebody forked up.
Why can't I say "fork"?
If you're trying to curse, you can't here.
I guess a lot of people in this neighborhood don't like it,
- so it's prohibited. - That's bull-shirt.
There is no profanity in The Good Place,
which I have my own personal issues with,
but people in The Good Place
don't want to be offended. I get it.
Things only started getting crazy
after I was an ash-hole to everyone at the party.
Ugh! You know I'm trying to say "ash-hole"
and not "ash-hole," right?
I really passionately love cursing, 'cause I'm English,
and so to have found a way to curse
so prolifically on NBC prime time is so thrilling.
And, also, it's allowed the show to then be something
that can be watched by the whole family.
Where the fork are we?
Fork.
Shirt. Ash-hole.
Holy forking shirt balls.
We're in The Good Place.
_
When I was trying to think about what the afterlife,
what "heaven" would actually mean,
one of the things that you would want
is to be able to answer any question
you could ever have about anything that's ever happened.
- Hey, Janet? - Hi, there!
- Ah! - How can I help you?
What the fork?! Who are you?
I'm Janet.
I'm the informational assistant here in The Good Place.
She's like this walking database.
You can ask her about the creation
of the universe or history or...
Oh, there was a guy who lived
in Avondale, Arizona, around 2002.
His name was Kevin Paltonic. Is he gay?
- No. - Really? Huh.
I guess he just didn't want to have sex with me.
- That's correct. - Well, that's fine.
- I wasn't that into him anyway. - Yes, you were.
Before they had fully written the script,
they were thinking that Janet would just be like an...
almost like a kiosk or, like, an ATM or a computer,
but then they thought it might be more fun
to have an actual human attached to it.
And to Janet, the best robot.
- Not a robot. - Girl.
- Not a girl. - And straight-up hottie.
I am attractive, yes.
_
The four humans all died in very different ways
and largely in ways
that sort of, in a comedic way, reflect who they were.
Tahani, for example, died when she was so jealous of her sister
being inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame
that she snuck into the party the night before,
had a fight with her sister,
threw a rope around a giant golden statue of her sister
to try to yank it over,
and it fell over and crushed her.
Aah!
She died crushed by a giant golden statue of her sister,
who she lived in the shadow of
and felt jealous of her whole life,
and it kind of dictated her personality
and is the driving force
behind what made her so forking annoying.
Chidi on Earth was incredibly smart,
incredibly indecisive.
Thirty minutes, Chidi?!
What's the harm in taking a few extra minutes
to find the perfect...
Chidi?
The air conditioner comes down and whacks him in the head,
and that's a wrap.
So, apparently Jason died, you know,
in the most normal way possible.
He locked himself inside a safe
because he wanted to rob a Mexican restaurant.
What if it doesn't work?
Hey, we thought of everything
except for an alibi and an escape route,
but we'll figure it out as we go.
We don't want to overthink these things.
You can call him basically a criminal but a lovable
and, you know, I think, an innocent criminal.
Jason's dead. He suffocated in that safe.
There were no air holes.
Plus, he did a bunch of whippets
while he was in there, which couldn't have helped.
At least he died doing what he loved...
a bunch of whippets.
Those were the three deaths that we conceived of after the pilot,
and they all were obviously very specifically designed
to reflect the life that each of those three people led.
Eleanor's death is a little less metaphorical.
How did I die? I-I don't remember.
The day Eleanor died, she was at the grocery store
buying herself a bottle of Lonely Gal Tequila,
her favorite drink,
and a do-gooder in the parking lot made her angry.
Hi, there! You have a second to talk about the environment?
No. Buzz off, whale humper.
And the bottle slipped out of her hand.
She reached down to pick it up.
Look what you made me do, jagoff.
Oh, my God. Look out!
Uh-oh.
A group of shopping carts knocked her over.
- That's how I died. - No. Sorry. There's more.
You were able to grab onto the front
of the column of shopping carts,
but it swept you right out into the street
where you were struck and killed by a mobile billboard truck
advertising an erectile-dysfunction pill
called Engorgilate.
Funnily enough, the first EMT to arrive
was an ex-boyfriend of yours.
Okay, that's... I get it. Thank you.
Okay.
Coming up...
Edward Bridge Danson,
you can't tell everyone the plot twist!
All of us felt genuinely a need to reevaluate our lives
from what happens at the very end of the series.
Fore!
... when "The Paley Center Salutes 'The Good Place'" returns.
This is the almighty judge on high of all beings
living and dead for all eternity.
My name's Shawn. I'm a naughty bitch.
Who taught you how to turn a human inside out
by reaching down their throat and grabbing their butt
- from the inside? - You did.
Just in the middle of torturing William Shakespeare
by describing the plot to the "Entourage" movie.
Eat butt, you ding-dongs.
Welcome to The Good Place.
I'm Marc Evan Jackson. I play Shawn.
Why don't we take a look behind the scenes
at some stuff people rarely get to see?
This is Kirston Mann,
the costume designer for "The Good Place."
- Hello. - Hello.
- Where are we right now? - We're in our costume trailer.
In season three, we saw Kristen
wearing a lot of stripy things as Eleanor.
Were those symbolic?
Kristen did wear a lot of kind of rainbow-type clothing,
but it's also collegiate.
Season three really is about her being back in school,
and I know that you're hoping that I say
- it's a stripe for each character. - I don't need you to say that.
- But I'm going to say it. - I know it's true.
It's a stripe for each character.
- What's in this sacred... - What?!
This is the magical bow tie that started it all.
When we were in Ted's first fitting,
we had this bow tie, and once we put it on,
we knew exactly where we were going with his character.
In the afterlife, there's a Good Place,
and there's a Bad Place.
You're in The Good Place.
It's made of peacock feathers, which we felt like
was sort of heavenly and beautiful.
And it turned out all to be a lie.
Well, thank you so much.
- Thank you so much. - This has been delightful.
- I adore you. - I adore you.
Cut!
_
When I first had the idea,
I thought, "Well, this is not an easy sell."
Dead people who read moral philosophy isn't a good pitch
for a network TV show, so I sort of felt like
I owed it to the studio and the network
to really understand what I was about to embark on.
We have to start somewhere.
- So how about Socrates? - All right.
All right. Let me just get into the mind-set of a human.
Ohh!
Ohh. I'm a human!
And my breathing tube is next to my eating tube!
Oh, and look! My arms end in stupid little sticks!
Okay. Proceed.
So, before I pitched it to anyone at NBC or Universal,
I knew what the entire season, first season, was,
and I think that really helped in terms of having them
understand the idea and get on board.
The other thing that really helped was getting
Ted Danson and Kristen Bell to sign on
because once you have Ted Danson and Kristen Bell in your show,
you can do whatever you want.
Thank you for being a friend. You're a pal and a confidant.
After you watched "Friends," did you also watch
- "Golden Girls"? - Yes, I did!
They love cheesecake, and one of them loves intercourse.
I went into his office, sat down for a...
what was supposed to be a one-hour meeting,
and we must have talked for almost three hours.
Every bit of my being wanted to say yes.
And Ted was just icing on the cake.
I know it sounds crazy, but if it weren't crazy,
they wouldn't call it a leap of faith!
They would call it... a sit of doubting.
So, I met Mike on another project,
and then it didn't really work out.
I asked him if he had anything else,
and about a week later,
he came in and pitched "The Good Place."
And I knew that Kristen Bell was interested,
so literally off of that one-hour meeting,
never saw a script, I said yes.
- We're in. - We're... All right. You go.
- We're in! - We're in!
- We're just so excited! - We're in.
It was a weird audition process
because this show was so secretive.
I didn't really know who was going to be a part of it
or who was going to star in it, which is probably a good thing
because that would have probably put a lot more pressure.
The audition piece that we had, it was a fake piece.
It wasn't about "The Good Place."
Mine was about a hotline operator
for broken dolls.
We recommend that you give
the one-eyed doll to your daughter
and use it to teach her an important lesson
about tolerance and superficial beauty.
- Nope, that's insane. - Okay.
Eleanor, I swear I am your friend,
and I will never cause you any harm.
You can hear Mike just giggling
in the background throughout these auditions,
but you never really know until you get on set
and you start shooting and actually see the result, right?
You just don't really know.
They were looking for an overly tall,
annoying Pakistani Englishwoman, which is basically me.
We've decided to have a silly-hat competition,
so whoever makes the silliest hat wins a prize,
but the prize is an even sillier hat!
I didn't have any acting experience,
so it felt really ridiculous to come to the king of comedy
and act in front of him.
I can't imagine anything more mortifying.
But I was told I had to go, and so I went, and I thought,
"Well, at least I get to meet Mike Schur, one of my heroes."
Something has come to my attention,
and I have to accuse you with an accusation,
but you know I wouldn't do that unless I was,
like, 150% sure that I had to.
There's a line in the scene where Jason says,
"Do you think this is a good idea?"
And the other character off-camera says,
"Yes, of course I do," and Manny's response is,
"Then why you got to talk bad about it?"
And all of the guys we saw, who were all funny and good,
said it the way that we'd sort of imagined you would say it,
and when Manny did that scene,
Manny, like, started crying a little bit.
I have yet to see it.
Are we going to air that in this, like, special thing?
Hopefully I get to see it if we ever do.
I love "Double Trouble."
You know that. I've always said it was genius.
Then why you got to talk bad about it?
When you see Manny Jacinto do it
and he has that sort of vulnerability
and that sweetness to him,
he taught me what my own character was.
We essentially cast him from that one line.
Jason Mendoza.
A failed deejay from Jacksonville, Florida.
I wasn't a failed deejay. I was pre-successful.
Hopefully none of you is claustrophobic.
Claustrophobic?
Who would ever be scared of Santa Claus?
Oh, the Jewish.
You from Florida?
- Jacksonville. - Yeah.
Fore!
Well done!
_
I knew it was going to be something special
from the first shot, quite honestly.
The first thing we shot was Ted Danson
introducing Eleanor and Chidi to Tahani and Jianyu.
I got to walk on with Ted Danson,
and that was so intimidating.
That's my first time ever properly acting.
Ted was wonderful. He kept on,
I think, pretending to fart on me just to relax me
'cause he could tell that I was very in awe of him.
The second they all walked out in their costumes
and we saw Ted Danson introduce everyone,
I thought, "Look, there's our family."
Eleanor, Chidi, I would like you to meet Tahani and Jianyu.
They are soul mates and your next-door neighbors.
I felt chills go up the back of my neck.
Like, I just knew. I knew we had something special.
This is a really special group.
I think that we're all spoiled rotten.
Truly, barely any work happens here.
- Oh, my God. - I mean, barely any work.
It's mostly just snacking and playing.
I've come to work for four years with people
that I genuinely love and want to hang out with.
Yeah, we can't be bought!
- ... just barely giving yourself the... - Yes.
Today, on the set, I was playing Bad Michael,
and they said,
"Please pronounce 'Eleanor' the way you do in real life,
which is 'El-a-nur.'"
And I went, "Wait. What?"
The entire three seasons,
I've been mispronouncing "Eleanor"
by calling her "El-a-nur."
Eleanor. Eleanor. Eleanor.
I was trying something, Eleanor. Give me a break.
- Coming up... - Hollywood, baby.
You know me. Janet!
Everyone was behaving very strangely.
Yeah, I just wasn't sure what we were going to hear.
Ohh!
... when "The Paley Center Salutes 'The Good Place'" returns.
_
Mike told the twist to obviously the writers
and Kristen Bell and myself.
Probably, that was it.
I'm a very good secret keeper. I didn't tell anyone.
I didn't even tell my husband.
I had a real ironically moral dilemma
about whether I should tell the other four actors.
It is so easy to live with a lie!
I once pretended to have a terminal illness to meet
Scott Wolf at a Sunglass Hut.
A victimless crime.
"If they didn't know about the twist,"
I reasoned, "They would give a completely honest performance."
I was playing the secret.
I had to be Michael, who was supposedly
running The Good Place and was a bit high-strung
because everything was falling apart,
and he wanted to make everything perfect
for his humans that he loved so much.
It's my duty to be calm and in control,
- and I'm falling apart. - No!
Michael, you are a paragon of fortitude.
You're a mountain of strength.
I'm not a mountain of strength.
I'm a canyon.
Full of poo-poo.
I was a demon torturing them, but that couldn't come out
until the, you know, end of season one, so...
How well did you keep that secret, Ted?
Uh, I'll get to that.
- Okay. - I'll get to that.
Not well, to answer her question.
I was hearing from mutual friends,
"Heard about the show you and Ted are doing.
Such a cool twist at the end."
And I was like, "Edward Bridge Danson,
you can't tell everyone the plot twist."
But he's chatty. What can you do?
I can't keep a secret, is basically the truth.
Holy mother-forking shirt balls.
What?
Wow!
Will and Manny and Jameela and I,
the babies, we didn't know the twist,
and Mike wanted to kind of keep it a secret from everybody.
It was a tough call, but I decided not to tell them.
I'm very glad I didn't because when we actually did tell them,
it was really fun.
I think it was after a table read.
He asked the four of us to join him in a room,
which was a little intimidating.
I think we were all sort of concerned
that maybe we were getting the news that the show was over.
Yeah, I just wasn't sure what we were going to hear.
So I thought we were going to get some sort of promotion
or something, but, no, that wasn't the case.
Everyone was behaving very strangely,
and we hadn't been given any information
about what was happening, and then we walked in,
and Kristen pulled up her mobile phone and started filming us,
and she had this really devious grin on her face,
and it was terrifying,
and Mike then broke down to us how the show was going to end.
"They're never going to call a train
to send us to The Bad Place.
They can't. Because we're already here.
This is The Bad Place."
Oh!
Once we found out, it was, like,
mind-blowing for all of us.
We're not stupid people,
but we never saw that ending coming,
and to be honest, nor did anyone else.
I think there was one person on Reddit who figured it out
in the whole world, but no one else,
and I think that's really cool.
And then it hit me.
They're never going to call a train
to take us to The Bad Place.
They can't.
Because we're already here.
A lot of people didn't know, until the very...
they got that last script, what was going to happen,
and even then, we didn't really know until we were on set,
and Ted Danson does that laugh.
This is The Bad Place.
Oh, man!
I can't believe you figured it out.
Oh, gah!
You ruined everything. You know that?
_
I did teach Ted Danson how to floss.
He needed to know for an episode,
and he was trying his hardest to do it on his own,
but he couldn't help but thrust his hips forward
in a very provocative manner, and I had to, like, you know,
sort of make it a little bit more G-rated for him,
and he would just, you know, lateral movement,
just sort of, like, guide him into that and...
Coming up...
Don't put me behind a bar, please.
I ate stage blood and some foam.
Some of the parts of the fake people flew into my mouth!
... when "The Paley Center Salutes 'The Good Place'" returns.
Why don't we take a look at some things
that most people don't get to see?
Each and every morning, we start in the hair and makeup trailer.
- Oh, look, it's D'Arcy Carden... - Oh, hello!
- ... in the makeup trailer. - Marc Evan Jackson.
- How are you? - My, my, my.
- My, my, my. Hi. - Hi.
Let's talk about the hair and makeup trailer a little bit.
It's probably the first place that you'll meet a guest star.
It's the first place I met you.
- It's about friendship. - True.
It's about running your lines, getting ready for the day,
preparing as an actor.
Hearing any hot gossip from yesterday...
Gossip, oh. And the day before.
It's hair and makeup that are the ones,
makeup specifically, that will come to you and say,
"You have a booger in your nose, and we can see it on camera.
I'm going to use this Q-tip to get it from you."
- Never happened to me. - Never happened to me!
- But it is... - I've read about it.
One time, Autumn, our makeup, she put a mask on me, like,
a nice cleansing mask, and it was white,
and she... and there was...
When we walked out of the trailer,
there just happened to be the entire studio audience
of "Family Feud" out there, just in line, waiting to go in.
- Because Hollywood is weird. - Right. Hollywood is weird.
- You drove home in a mask? - Yeah.
- What if you got pulled over? - I would just be like,
"Hollywood, baby. You know me. Janet!"
What takes longer? Becoming Janet or becoming Bad Janet?
- Oh, that's a great question. - Thank you.
Becoming Bad Janet takes longer.
Bad Janet, uh, where is the nearest café?
Oh, um, that's a good question.
It's up your mom's butt, you fat dink.
The hair and makeup trailer is very special,
a big part of being an actor in television or movies.
And thank you for visiting.
- Thank you, D'Arcy. - Thank you, Marc.
And now there's nothing you don't know
about hair and makeup.
_
Sounds like you had a pretty crazy year.
- Hmm. - Want to talk about it?
When I did "Cheers," it took me a while
to be comfortable playing that part.
You know, never hang out in bars.
If a woman kissed me, we got married.
You know, I was that guy.
That is the plot to the movie "Kangaroo Jack."
- Why did I tell you that? - It's unclear.
So going back, standing behind a bar, is my nightmare.
It was like... I was all thumbs and sweaty and nervous.
And don't put me behind a bar, please.
- What do I owe ya? - The real question, Eleanor,
is, what do we owe to each other?
What? Did I sell you a drink?
Am I a bartender?
Drinks are on me.
_
If you're doing a TV show about moral philosophy,
it's kind of like you got to go all-in, right?
Who died and left Aristotle in charge of ethics?
Plato.
As far as philosophy and ethics,
the writers usually call me into the writers' room
and just say, like, "Tell us everything you know,"
and I teach them all about it.
I will try to help you.
I am going to need some time to read every book
ever written about human psychotherapy.
And now I've done that, so let's begin.
Okay. So I haven't read any of the books,
or I don't really know who all the philosophers are.
I did try to read one book, and it was hard.
This is the Mike Schur part that I love.
They have, like, three ethics professors on speed dial.
I am here to learn about ethnics.
Well, Mike Schur had specifically asked me
to come and speak to them about the trolley problem
that intuitively makes people realize
that their own moral sense or intuitions
are in conflict with one another.
We are going to tackle
one of the most famous ethical dilemmas:
the trolley problem.
Is this a game?! I go first! I call blue!
There's no... No. This is... No.
This is a thought experiment first introduced
by British philosopher Philippa Foot in 1967.
You're on a trolley.
You're headed for a group of, say, five people.
If you can pull the lever, you only hit one person.
I'm trying to explain this to the class.
Michael thinks it would be funny
to actually make it very real and visceral.
Maybe there's a more concrete approach.
Here. Let's try this.
Oh, God! Michael, what did you do?!
I made the trolley problem real
so we could see how the ethics would actually play out!
There are five workers on this track and one over there.
Here are the levers to switch the tracks. Make a choice.
The thing is, I mean, ethically speaking...
No time, dude! Make a decision!
Well, it's tricky! I mean, on the one hand,
if you ascribe to a purely utilitarian world, you...
Okay. So... what did we learn?
To shoot this, we had a trolley,
and it was attached to a truck
upon which was mounted a blood cannon.
Wait! Ohh! Oh, my God!
The blood came out of the cannon with such velocity
that I ate stage blood and some foam.
It's just a simulation.
I would never make you kill real people.
Oh, well, that's reassuring because some of the parts
of the fake people flew into my mouth!
I think that these ideas from philosophy give us
a very clear, very academic, very quantifiable backbone
on which to sort of base our comedy and our arguments.
The basis of this whole show is this points system,
and eventually, in season three, it's revealed,
like, it's screwed up in a very specific way.
Life now is so complicated.
It's impossible for anyone to be good enough for The Good Place.
Your big revelation is "Life is complicated"?
That's not a revelation.
That's a divorced woman's throw pillow.
What else you got?
_
It had so many guest stars who were so phenomenal.
Like, we had Stephen Merchant,
who, in England, is our national treasure.
Gotta run. We're having a little thing
in the break room for Marisol's birthday.
She's turning 39 million. Again.
Don't think I've ever been creepier with anyone
than I was with Maya Rudolph. Just followed her around set
just trying to absorb her genius.
Your Honor, please hear our case.
You frankly wouldn't believe
what we've been through just to be here today.
I mean, I would because
I just learned everything about you, but keep talking.
I am, like, obsessed with your accent.
We have made so much progress,
and all we ask is an audience with you to prove it.
- Say "aluminum." - Aluminium.
"Nium"! I love that!
Every single take of hers is different and unique.
- Idiot says "what." - What?
Idiot says "hmm."
Hmm?
You heard me. Did I st-st-stutter?
You stuttered the second time, yeah.
The guest stars are amazing.
Mike really chose people who had chemistry on and off-screen.
We got to get back for "The Bachelor."
I'm going to be pissed if I miss the rose ceremony.
And what's the significance of the key chain?
Nothing. I just like frogs. I'm a frog guy.
Hi, snail. I don't name them in case
they already have a name they prefer.
- Huh. - Ah! Good-bob!
I hope we same place again very now.
- His brain is wrong. - Ha-ha!
- Coming up... - The visual effects
on this show is, like, a huge part of the world.
It really was like on the show.
It devastated me.
It's devastating. You're devastated right now.
... when "The Paley Center Salutes 'The Good Place'" returns.
_
One of the writers on the show,
the genius Jen Statsky, who also is one of my best friends,
we went to a Beyoncé concert.
It was during the writing process of season one,
and we were enjoying ourselves,
and so was everybody else in the stadium
except for the one guy next to us,
who was really not having a good time,
and we sort of gently said, "You know,
if you're not enjoying yourself, you should just, like, go.
Just go." And he looked at me, and he really took me in.
He looked me up and down and just went, "You're basic."
And it really was like on the show.
It devastated me.
Face it, dude! I'm the best thing that ever happened to you.
Because guess what, Chidi. Ya basic!
- Eleanor. - Yeah, I know.
You want to do that thing where we're arguing and fighting,
but then suddenly it's like, "Whoa, this is hot,"
and we start making out.
Dream on! Or whatever. Fine. Let's just do it.
Eleanor likes to get to the point real quick.
She likes to cut to the chase,
and she likes to cut hard and deep.
And "ya basic" just sums up Eleanor's way
of saying, "I'm better than you,"
which is a feeling that she has to hang onto in order to survive
before she starts to evolve as a person.
I am not basic. Ya basic!
No, Mom. Ya basic.
Luckily, we had the last laugh,
and Jen put it in the show, and now it's a thing
that has been said many times on this show, which I love.
In the words of one of my actual friends, ya basic.
It's a human insult. It's devastating.
You're devastated right now.
_
The visual effects on the show is, like, a huge part of the world.
The world itself is magical.
- Anything can happen. - Whoo!
And so you need to actually have that represented.
We hired this guy named David Niednagel,
who has been our sort of in-house effects guy
supervisor designer everything.
The first episode was very difficult
because you didn't know what it was supposed to be, you know?
Like, you're just kind of handed a script, and you didn't know
what the whole vibe of the whole show was.
Pretty much everything was very bizarre.
You had flying shrimp and a giant frog
eating shrimp out of the sky.
And a giant ladybug cruising through the neighborhood,
and people were jumping out of the way.
Kicking a puppy into the sun.
There were so many weird, bizarre things that,
after doing the pilot, it became very obvious, like,
"Oh, this is what 'The Good Place' is."
For every episode, we'd try to put things into the plot
that could not be in any other show,
whether that's a giant ladybug or, like,
a sinkhole opening up magically in the middle of dinner.
We wanted to, like, fully take advantage
of everything the world we'd set it in offered.
Nuts. Thank you. Oh!
David Niednagel is our guy who is a one-man band.
He literally does 95% of everything that we shoot,
and he practices at home.
You'll have to get him to show...
Oh, I hope you can include it.
His kids are his, like, you know,
stand-ins for the real thing.
He'll show us the renderings of the visual-effects moments,
and his kids will be doing it, and it's...
They're... And they're adorable.
So he always comes in and says to the actors and says,
"Here's what it's going to look like.
I know you're just going to open your mouth right now
and pretend pennies are coming out,
but this is what it'll look like."
It's just astounding.
Ahh...
I think this show is pretty demanding for me,
and so it's nice that I can kind of combine that
with my family life and just have my kids,
you know, helping me out,
and it's something that I think we'll look back at for years,
and it's nice to see the clip of what we did,
you know, as a family next to what was on the show.
All right. Good.
My favorite joke in the visual effects?
I really like the lava monster.
We're goin' streaking!
Aaah!
It wasn't planned in the script. We kind of showed up,
and Mike and Drew Goddard,
they're like, "Hey, we got an idea.
We want this lava monster to come in."
And I'm like, "All right. Well, that's a little bit bigger
than what we were planning, but we'll see what we can do."
- Got a light? - Uh, yeah, obviously, I have a light.
You know, you guys aren't supposed to be smoking.
You're supposed to keep your human suit on.
Those suits are really itchy for us.
And Joe Mande was on set that day,
so we had Joe Mande dress in the green-screen suit.
Hey, Todd, got a light?
Uh, yeah, obviously, I have a light.
You know, you guys aren't supposed to be smoking.
It was completely unnecessary,
and so it was fun just to see him do that,
and we got him to do it another time,
but I think after that, he figured out
that he didn't need to wear the green suit.
Uh. Oh, sorry.
I thought we reserved the conference room.
No, Todd. We have it until 3:00.
Sorry. Sorry, everyone.
It wasn't necessary.
Niednagel is just constantly making our imaginations
come to life over and over again,
and we genuinely cannot make the show without him.
- Coming up... - Season four is just lovely.
I had a lot of fun directing. I had more fun than I thought.
- So you're in my shot. - Then they'll have to use mine.
... when "The Paley Center Salutes 'The Good Place'" returns.
And now we're inside the actual engine
of any motion-picture operation. We're at Craft Service.
This is the first team PA, Johnathon Johnson.
- "First Team" is code for what? - Cast.
That's right. You babysit us, I feel like?
I would say it's more like shepherding and corralling.
- Babysitting. Got it. - Babysitting is a bit demeaning.
Sure. Yeah. But accurate?
- Eh. - A little bit.
What's available on this table?
- And the answer is everything? - I mean,
this table specifically, on this show,
literally everything.
This is Craft Services. This is my happy place.
- This is the true Good Place. - This is Max Cohen.
He is the Sustainability PA.
We realized in season three that we used a shocking
and sad number of water bottles. How many was that?
Yes. We used 30,000 water bottles.
That's too many. How many are we using this year?
- Zero. - How do we do that?
We have set up water dispensers,
and we've issued everybody their own bottle.
They can reuse this, refill it all season,
and it cuts down on the waste.
30,000 bottles.
"The Good Place" is a very good place.
Are there specific cast members that have favorite snacks?
- I do know Jameela likes chips. - Jameela likes chips?
She does like to stop and grab a bag of chips.
Mm-hmm. Jameela likes snacks.
I'll say it. And I don't think she'd be...
I don't think she'd argue with me.
These are pancakes stuffed with meat and cheese
that we then pour oil over,
so, um, at some point, my heart will probably stop beating,
and it will be because of "The Good Place,"
but when I die, I hope to end up right back here,
in "The Good Place" Craft Services.
Now that you have the munchies,
this has been Craft Service.
Thanks for doing this.
_
It feels harder to wrap this show than most shows I've done
because of...
the family that we've created here
wasn't just a work family.
It was like a family that felt
that we were actually doing something important.
We're obviously not saving lives,
but I think we are affecting people.
Eleanor, Chidi, Tahani, and Jason all look at each other
as the clock ticks down, and we end the show.
You know, I'm sad to be wrapping up the show,
but it feels right.
We've run out of track, you know? This is...
You know, this is the story that we wanted to tell.
It's a very rare thing to be able to do it exactly the way
you wanted to and end it exactly the way you wanted to,
so I'm trying to focus on the rare joy
of that experience instead of the sadness
that I feel from the fact that it's ending.
We have signed up to be part of Mike Schur's brain,
and I so respect that he decided to stop it
when he finished the story, that he didn't pad it
and all of a sudden start writing, you know,
"And the gang get caught in a snowstorm
and sing a musical," you know?
That there's none of that, that there is,
"Here is my morality tale.
This is how I think the universe works,
and now it's over."
I hate to see you go,
but I love to watch you walk away.
I really needed to hear that. Thanks.
Kristen Bell directed an episode this season,
and I think people are going to be really impressed
when they see what she did.
One of the things that she does as an actor
that is remarkable is, she...
I've never seen any other actor do this.
She corrects her own camera blocking.
- Don't lean so far forward. - Why?
Because I have a camera right there.
- So? - So you're in my shot.
Then they'll have to use mine.
I had a lot of fun directing.
I had more fun than I thought I was going to have.
I was also really grateful that I was able to direct this cast
because they're all so perfect
and unique and wonderful in their own right.
There's something very special about this particular show,
this particular set, the crew, the writers,
Mike Schur. It's like a perfect mix, a perfect little...
It's too dreamy. It's too good to be true.
It's The Good Place.
All of us felt genuinely a need
to reevaluate our lives from what happens
at the very end of this series, and so I'm sorry.
That's a frustrating answer 'cause you don't know
what happens, but you will.
The cast and I joke about it all the time.
It's like, "Does it really get any better than this?"
It's just such a great family of people
and such a great story to be a part of.
We're planting seeds in people's brains.
We're planting conversations at dinner tables.
There's a huge demographic
of young people that watch our show.
There's 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12-year-olds
that are watching the show and digesting philosophy lessons.
But we are talking about decency.
We are talking about what it means
to lead a good life,
that there are consequences to our actions.
There are ripple effects, and you put out a certain amount
of good or a certain amount of bad into the universe,
and someone is watching.
I love that.
- Synced & corrected by MementMori - -- www.addic7ed.com --