After “The Good Place”: Three More Shows To Help You Think About Ethics, Philosophy, and Being a Good Person
By: Michael A Gold
Tags: TV Series, Netflix, The Good Place

The Good Place marks a weird experiment in TV: what if you made a half-hour sitcom about the afterlife that was all about moral philosophy? And what if, instead of quietly fading after a sparsely-viewed pilot, it became a modest hit and generated intense critical and fan conversation? What if it caused books like What We Owe Each Other by T.M. Scanlon to briefly hit the bestseller list?

NBC/Universal

The Good Place was unique in that it structured itself around trying to figure out what it means to be a good person. It presented us with four deeply flawed people (as well as a demon and one not-a-girl) and showed us how they overcame those flaws and learned what it meant to be a well-rounded human being.

NBC/Universal

It works because the show gave us compelling characters with believable personal drama, and had them not only explain, but demonstrate the philosophy at the heart of the show. This fun and accessible approach to difficult philosophical questions got a mainstream audience to think seriously about moral philosophy. If it worked for you, you might be wondering where to go next. The following three shows can help you think more complexly about ethics, including some of the central questions of The Good Place: what does it mean to be a good person? The Good Place takes place in the afterlife and forces it’s protagonists to deal with their behavior in life. These shows put ethics into a particular context for the living. These may not be as outwardly philosophical as The Good Place, but they do ask big questions, and are all available on Netflix.

Nickelodeon

Avatar

Avatar: The Last Airbender has been sort of hard to get your hands on until this summer, when it finally returned to Netflix. Before then, you would have had to buy it on DVD: a tough proposition in the world of streaming, no matter how highly recommended the series is. And it does come highly recommended.

Nickelodeon

The show follows the adventures of Aang, the newest Avatar, as he seeks to defeat the ruler of the Fire Nation and save the world from total conquest. In a world where certain people can manipulate (“bend”) one of the four elements of nature (Water, Earth, Fire, and Air), the Avatar is a special person capable of bending all four. When the Avatar dies, they are reincarnated into a new body. Aang is pulled out of an iceberg in the first episode by Katara and Sokka, water tribe members and siblings who promise to help Aang learn to bend all four elements.

Nickelodeon

While the show is cute and genuinely funny, it also tackles some pretty serious topics. For example, we learn pretty quickly that Aang is the “last Airbender” because 100 years earlier, when he was locked in the iceberg, the Fire Nation wiped out the Air Nomads and thus all other Airbenders. Aang is a survivor of genocide. The show attempts to grapple with the realities of the Fire Nation’s conquests, dealing with occupations, resistance movements, and ideologies of colonialism. The show poses high level questions in a way easily understood by a middle school audience, questions about what kinds of resistance are acceptable, when violence is permitted, and who is allowed to commit that violence.

Nickelodeon

The most impressive element is Aang’s nemesis, the exiled prince of the Fire Nation, Zuko. Zuko is tasked with restoring his honor by capturing Aang. He is guided by his uncle, former heir to the throne and war hero Iroh, who has his own complex relationship to war and to the land of his birth. Zuko is frequently forced to interrogate his relationship to his past, to his destiny, and to his own sense of morality. Critically, at many points in the series, he is explicitly forced to wrestle with the line between doing his duty and doing what is right. I don’t want to spoil where it goes, but I think Chidi would have been impressed with the lessons taught by Uncle Iroh. In particular, Avatar interrogates the role of ethics in relation to one’s responsibility to history and to the world at large. Can Aang do something reprehensible to save the world? Can Zuko do what’s right, even if it means betraying his family? This show helps to reframe the question of what we owe to each other into “what do we owe, and to whom?”

The Witcher

Netflix

There is currently only one season of The Witcher on Netflix, but there are also eight books and four video games from the franchise, not to mention countless comics. Still, even in just ten episodes, the TV show does a good job of getting at the heart of the franchise and the questions it asks.

At first blush, The Witcher seems like any other standard fantasy story. There are elves and dwarves, there’s magic and dragons. There’s even a chosen one and a prophecy about what that chosen one will do. The twist is that the show isn’t about the chosen one at all. It’s about a Witcher named Geralt, who hunts monsters for what amounts to pennies. He’s also a mutant, having undergone a procedure to make himself a superior fighter and extend his natural life. Geralt goes on a variety of adventures, ones which eventually lead him to a cast of characters that include his on-again-off-again lover Yennefer, the lascivious bard Dandelion (called Jaskier in the show), and eventually, the subject of prophecy herself: Ciri.

Netflix

Geralt’s adventures regularly begin simply enough, with some villagers hiring him to take care of a devil that has been bothering them, or with him killing a monster in the hopes that he can get a little cash for it. However, these adventures often become more complex. For example, the devil he’s hired to kill isn’t a devil at all, but a Sylvan: an endangered and intelligent creature protected by the elves, themselves a marginalized group. He can’t get any money for the monster, but when he brings it to town, a sorcerer asks him to kill a bandit, a woman he claims is monstrous in her own way.

Netflix

While it would be interesting enough for the series to present us with tales of a Witcher trying to do the right thing, the world it takes place in is the real draw. Competing belief systems and worldviews lead to natural philosophical and ideological conflicts between characters. Additionally, the world has a heavy history, one involving pogroms, population displacement, and generational trauma; all things that the characters have to deal with. Geralt himself claims in the first episode to believe there is no such thing as the lesser evil, that there is only evil, but this belief is frequently put to the test. When both options are going to hurt someone, he often wants to choose inaction, but this regularly proves to be its own kind of evil. In the games, players are often put in a position where they have to make decisions without having all the knowledge needed to make the right choice, the consequences of these choices to be revealed later.

Netflix

In conversation with The Good Place, this series provides some helpful texture. Making good choices or doing the right thing is not just an individual choice, it happens in a context. It’s impossible to know what the right choice is all the time because we rarely have all the information truly needed to make this decision. I think if they were forced to play the video games, Jason would do very well, and Chidi would struggle. When you are in the tick of it, ethical decisions have to be made with conviction, they have to be decisive. The Witcher is largely about doing what you think is right in the moment, and doing your best to repair the harm that comes from that decision later. However, as Geralt learns many times, sometimes you can’t avoid doing harm, and sometimes you can’t repair the harm you do. You just have to do what you can.

Bojack Horseman

Netflix

Easily the darkest of the three shows, Bojack Horseman may also seem the least likely. But what Bojack Horseman does and does very well is reflect on the extent to which a person can change, and what they should do with the harm they’ve done when they do change.

Netflix

Bojack himself is an intensely unlikable character. He is not a charming anti-hero or a lovable scamp. Bojack is petty, cruel, and narcissistic. He harms himself and others repeatedly. In no uncertain terms: Bojack is a bad person. But he is convinced, and says several times, that he’s not. He’s a good person deep down, he’s just done bad things. Effectively the rest of the show is dedicated to sussing out whether or not this is the case. Eventually, Bojack does decide that he’s a bad person and therefore cannot be redeemed, but the show doesn’t seem so willing to ultimately condemn him either. In other words, Bojack is neither allowed to coast by on his insistence that he’s a good person, not is he allowed to wallow in his badness.

Netflix

Again, we have a situation where the things that make Bojack so awful are put in a context of abuse and parental neglect. In turn, his parents’ cruelty is given it’s own context. Bojack therefore ends up being about cycles of trauma and how they inform our actions. Bojack himself cannot improve his own life or do the right thing until he confronts and breaks this cycle. Other characters are stuck in similar cycles. Todd is constantly trying to prove that he can be taken seriously, or conversely, allows himself to be walked all over because he is, at heart, a goofy guy. Princess Carolyn never recognizes her own worth or the ways in which she needs to make her life work for her. Diane’s constant cycle of self-loathing and her superiority complex lead her into some truly dark places, and only by learning to accept the love of others is she able to find something resembling happiness. And Mr. Peanutbutter realizes too late that he is the common denominator in all his failed relationships: his charm and positive attitude aren’t enough to keep away his own toxicity.

It’s only by breaking these cycles that the characters learn to be happy and to develop into fully realized people. Some succeed more than others.

Bojack himself also has to deal with issues of forgiveness, first for himself, and then from other people. There are many characters who find a way to forgive Bojack for the harm he does, but there are also many who can’t or won’t. By the end of the show, there are quite a few characters who explicitly do not forgive Bojack, no matter how sorry he claims to be. The most notable in season 1 is Herb Kazazz, the man who Bojack got fired from his sitcom. Herb has a terminal illness and vows to take his bitterness toward Bojack to the grave. Because Bojack is unable to get forgiveness for what he’s done, making amends is not possible. The only thing that he can do is try to do better in the future. This is bleak, in many ways, but it’s also real. We cannot always make amends.

Netflix

In conversation with The Good Place, Bojack shows us that while our choices are ours to make, they are also informed by the pain we have experienced, and that pain is informed by the pain of those who inflicted it. Only by breaking cycles of trauma can we hope to make good ethical choices later on. I think that Eleanor would have appreciated this show for both the way that it lets us off the hook (you can’t control how your trauma impacts you) but also for the way that it forces us to reckon with ourselves (you are responsible for how you let it impact others).

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The Good Place made moral philosophy accessible to a mainstream audience, but the best thing about it is that it can be used as a lens to view lots of other shows that can also help us to understand ethics. It has a few blind spots, but by using what we learn from it, we can round out our understanding of ethics by watching all kinds of other stuff. Of course, it may also be worth cracking open some of the books Chidi made his class read.