'The Good Place' creator Mike Schur thinks if COVID-19 is a test, Americans are failing on a daily basis
- The series finale of Mike Schur's latest show, the recently Emmy-nominated comedy "The Good Place," aired at the start of 2020.
- Insider spoke with Schur about how "The Good Place" strove to show people how to be the best version of themselves.
- Now the US is struggling to contain the COVID-19 pandemic and there are near-daily public controversies over people not wanting to wear face masks.
- "This is one of those moments where it feels like we're in a battle for the soul of the world," Schur said. "Sometimes I think we're winning, and sometimes I think we're losing."
When Mike Schur set out to create "The Good Place" (the NBC series up for best comedy at the 2020 Emmy Awards next month), he had no way of knowing that the world would be embattled in a pandemic just as the show's fourth and final season came to an end.
The entire year has been "very weird" for Schur, with the final season of "The Good Place" airing, the COVID-19 pandemic, and then the recent loss of his father-in-law, Regis Philbin. Just four days after Philbin's death, the 2020 Emmy nominees were announced, with seven nominations rolling in for "The Good place."
"I got a million texts and emails and went like, 'Oh, that's nice,'" Schur said in a recent interview with Insider. "And then went back to the vicissitudes of real life. So yeah, it's been a very weird year and it was a very weird moment for a thousand reasons."
Insider spoke with Schur about how "The Good Place" was weirdly prescient when it came to the COVID-19 pandemic, and the "depressing" reality of how many Americans seem unwilling to do something as simple as wear a face mask.
'The Good Place' was weirdly prescient when it came to relevance to the COVID-19 pandemic, and the US response to the virus is now a 'daily embarrassment' for Schur
Since March, when COVID-19 first became an urgent issue in Los Angeles and many other US cities, Schur has had the surreal experience of watching lessons from "The Good Place" get tested in real life.
"The main question that the show posed over four years was: 'What do we owe to each other?'" Schur said. "That comes from this contractualist philosophy where, when you're coming up with rules, and you base the rules on what other reasonable people wouldn't reject."
Right now, especially in the US where COVID-19 case numbers are still rising, there is a simple set of best practices that health officials have set out for Americans: Wear a mask, stay six feet away from people not in your household, and wash your hands frequently.
And yet, as Schur laments, our country's population seems unable to agree to these guidelines.
"In terms of asking yourself what you owe to other people, the mask-wearing thing is the most straightforward and simple calculation that could possibly exist in the world," Schur said. "Because you don't wear the mask for yourself — you wear it for other people. If you are sick, it limits the spread of your disease to other people. And the idea that you wouldn't wear it is pure and utter selfishness. That's all it is."
Since February, as COVID-19 cases spiked around the world and many cities underwent shelter-in-place orders, "The Good Place" fans have shared memes from the show that were oddly relevant to the current situation.
"There were a lot of things from the show that ended up being weirdly prescient," Schur said. "Someone pointed out to me recently that we wrote a joke where Jason Mendoza said he had a virus named after him for kissing a bat on a dare."
As Business Insider reported, genetic research suggests that the COVID-19 virus "is most closely related to other coronaviruses found in bats."
"I was like, 'Jesus, that is like remarkably accurate, in terms of what happened in the world in the last year,'" Schur said. "That tends to happen a lot if shows are just around for a while — they end up accidentally predicting things or being zeitgeisty."
Aside from Jason Mendoza's bat-related virus, "The Good Place" has a much broader link to the pandemic in the form of the aforementioned contractualist philosophy.
For Schur, the real-world displays of selfishness are hard to deal with on a daily basis
"When you lay it out, in terms of what's being asked of individuals, what the benefits are for other people, and their steadfast refusal to engage in that simple behavior in order to help other people, it's incredibly depressing," Schur said, referring to people who are refusing to wear face masks in public. "It's a daily embarrassment to me on behalf of all of humanity that we can't do this really simple thing that would allow [us to] get back to where we all want to be."
"I have to say, after thinking about basically this one issue for five straight years, to watch people utterly ignore the lesson it's just so awful. Not that I thought the show was going to save the world or anything," Schur continued through laughter. "But you don't need a TV show to tell you that you owe things to other people. You should just understand that."
Finding pockets of optimism is hard, too, Schur said. When he walks his dog around his Los Angeles neighborhood, everybody he encounters is wearing a mask.
"I have this instinct to just say, 'Thank you, thank you, everybody! Good job. Thank you!'" Schur said. "But then I go home and look at Twitter and there are 50 videos of ding-dongs in Huntington Beach going into a Trader Joe's and screaming at people asking them to wear a mask. There's a constant oscillation between seeing things that give you hope, and then immediately seeing things that take that hope away."
"This is one of those moments where it feels like we're in a battle for the soul of the world," Schur continued. "And sometimes I think we're winning, and sometimes I think we're losing."
The idea for "The Good Place" first came from Schur, and many of his writer and actor friends, trying to talk about "the stuff [they] thought was important," like what it means to be a good person. The show explored both ancient and contemporary ideas around moral philosophy, and Schur says it's "a bit of a miracle" that the show was made in the first place.
"I still can't believe that we got to actually do it," Schur said. "But I'm very proud of it, and I'm glad that we spent four years talking about these issues because I do think, even absent COVID, that it's the most important stuff you can think about as a human being on Earth."
"Obviously when we started the show, we never in a billion years could have predicted this particular stress test on the human ability to understand that we owe things to other people," Schur continued. "We were just talking about it in the abstract, and now it's become incredibly concrete. Now it's a test and we are failing the test on a daily basis."
You can stream the final season of "The Good Place" on NBC, and watch the upcoming Emmy Awards on September 20 on ABC.