Michael Schur on the Good Place committee: There’s a reason they’re “dressed like hikers from Oregon”

We’re nearing the end of The Good Place (it’s hard for us to even admit that, we are bereft), so it should perhaps come as no surprise that its creator and steward, Michael Schur, is talking about it a little more freely than he otherwise might. (Case in point: Our own Erik Adams’ chat with him about last week’s incredible cameo.) In a terrific conversation with The Daily Beast’s Matt Wilstein for the site’s The Last Laugh, Schur talks about everything from the possibility of an Office reboot (“I don’t think anyone would ever do that without [creator] Greg Daniels’ at least blessing, if not outright participation”) to his response to realizing he was in Bill Cosby’s old office (he moved as soon as he got the chance).

He also explained the choice to make the Good Place committee, led by Paul Scheer, so feckless, a choice he calls the show’s “most overtly political”:

It’s not a mistake that they’re all dressed like hikers from Oregon. That’s the most overtly political that we’ve gotten and it’s just a straight-up frustration over what I see from Democrats in Congress and other local governments where it’s like, ‘We’re not just going to be reasonable, we’re going to overcompensate and just concede a bunch of stuff.’ That’s not being reasonable. Conceding all the things that you care about and that you want [to] fight for unilaterally is not being reasonable, it’s being stupid. It’s betraying your own value system and it drives me nuts. There’s this weird impulse that progressives have sometimes of ‘let’s be not just reasonable but overly solicitous of the other side. And even when they’re very obviously acting in bad faith, let’s go along with it because that puts us on some sort of moral high ground.’ And it doesn’t work that way. It’s a one-way street. So the Good Place Committee is just my personal frustration with that aspect of progressivism.

New headline:

Michael Schur dunks on hikers from Oregon

The Good Place has never shied away from the odd political statement, dating all the way back to the very beginning; in the third episode of the series, for example, Janet (D’Arcy Carden) cheerily reveals that Christopher Columbus is in The Bad Place. But this is a particularly good (and justifiable) take. We’ll see what else the Good Place committee doesn’t get up to when it returns on Thursday.

You can listen to the full conversation here.

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