Good news: There are less than two weeks until the fourth (and final) The Good Place season arrives. Bad news: There are still almost two weeks until the new The Good Place season arrives! Fortunately, NBC has tossed all of us afterlife fans a collective bone, with the webisode series The Selection, while filling in an important piece of the plot that will kick off season four.
As you might remember, season three ended with Judge Gen coming up with a new experiment: Michael the architect is tasked with creating a new neighborhood, while Shawn the demon has to pick four people on the same level of badness as our original four: Eleanor, Chidi, Tahani, and Jason. Unless the four old people can redeem the four new people, the Bad Place wins. As EW explains, Eleanor et al. “shall serve as morality mentors to four new test subjects, who are chosen by the Bad Place and who will need to better themselves in the time of one Earth year. Two of the human guinea pigs were introduced in the finale—Chidi’s neuroscientist ex Simone (Kirby Howell-Baptiste) and Tahani’s enemy in the blogosphere, John (Brandon Scott Jones)—and the other two will be revealed in the season 4 premiere.”
Now… how to pick the new candidates? In these just-released short episodes, available on the NBC app, Shawn and his slew of demons attempt to find the experiment subjects. It’s an arduous task to be sure, as many candidates are rejected for being too far down the level of badness (Stalin, John Wayne Gacy, both Steve and Adolf Hitler). And somehow this crew must also fit in both ordering lunch (try the burrito filled with hair) and making Emily Dickinson listen to a Joe Rogan podcast. Honestly, even those brief clips are so fun, they’re making us long for season four even more—so we may have to give them a rewatch or two over the next few weeks.
Season four of The Good Place will finally arrive on Thursday, September 26. Did we mention we can’t wait?