Ted Danson Says ‘The Good Place’ Had Ethics Professors on Speed Dial

The Good Place did such a good job of exploring morality that some universities use the show as part of their ethics programs, Ted Danson said this week on the Where Everybody Knows Your Name podcast. “Literally,” he said, wondering if Notre Dame was still offering its Good Place lectures.

What made The Good Place so academically sound? “We had on speed dial, we had three or four ethics professors who would talk to the writers daily to make sure what we were talking about was right,” Danson said. “Sometimes it’s good to get a second, third opinion.”

Good Place creator Mike Schur gave a shout-out to those consultants during a Reddit AMA in 2017. “We have two excellent academic advisors — Todd May, from Clemson, and Pamela Hieronymi from UCLA — with whom we Skype and meet fairly often, and it’s no joke my favorite part of putting the show together,” he posted. “The entire Trolley Problem episode came from Pamela teaching us her class on it, in our writers’ room.”

Making good ethical choices is pretty much the point of The Good Place, in which Eleanor, Tahani, Jason and Chidi try to rectify the human errors in judgment that landed them in “The Bad Place.” Once the characters overcame their fatal flaws, they were allowed to choose their ultimate destiny in the afterlife. “It was perfect. It was an absolutely perfect goodbye,” Danson said on the Today show in 2020, per People. “It’s how you hope the universe works, really.”

“To me, that is the dream of what life on Earth would really be like if you could call your own shots, but you were calling them because you had this really calm feeling, like there was nothing left for you to do,” Schur told Vulture in 2020. “It has to be a choice. If it’s not a choice, it’s not better than Earth.”

The show was also a way for Schur to wrestle with different moral philosophies. “I think the show is honestly trying to muddle through the pros and cons of all of these ethics without coming out and saying which one is ‘right’ or ‘the best,’” he said during the Reddit AMA.  

“The show ended when it did, but if it hadn’t, I don’t know what we’d be doing, because suddenly the whole world is talking about morality and ethics,” Schur said. “Maybe that would have been good, I don’t know. Our ratings would have been higher.”

Those people who did watch are grateful for the show’s thoughtful consideration of ethics, including Reddit AMA participant u/wayward_sword: “The show’s phenomenal and helped me pass Philosophy 101 so thank you so very much.”