The Good Place Season 4 First-Look Trailer Revealed
It's pretty forking terrible that The Good Place is ending soon, but fans can get pumped up for the last season thanks to a brand-new video from NBC.
The first-look trailer for the otherworldly comedy's fourth and final season has dropped — with the cast (including Kristen Bell, Ted Danson, William Jackson Harper, Manny Jacinto, Jameela Jamil, and D'arcy Carden) introducing the first real footage released in advance of the season premiere. Hold onto your frozen yogurt, 'cause the video reveals something pretty big about Bell's Eleanor Shellstrop. Spoilers ahead!
In the Good Place season 4 first-look trailer, each cast member reminds the audience that "everything is fine" — a reference to the writing on the wall seen by characters when they arrive in the fake Good Place created by Michael (Danson) as an experiment — before refreshing them about what happened at the end of season 3.
If you need a reminder about the Good Place season 3 finale, here goes: Michael and his initial group of humans (Bell's Eleanor, Harper's Chidi, Jacinto's Jason, and Jamil's Tahani) argue their case, which is that humans aren't evaluated fairly enough on Earth to ever make it into the real Good Place. Rather than outright meddling with numbers, the evil architects in the Bad Place are simply allowing an endless number of variables to exist, which end up negatively affecting a human's score. For example, a person could gain points by buying flowers for their grandmother, but if underpaid workers picked those flowers, the person's point total ultimately goes down.
To further their cause, Michael and the gang ask that four new humans be placed in his pretend Good Place to see if they, like the original four, end up improving in the afterlife. However, the people running the Bad Place get to pick those four humans — so naturally, they go with the worst possible options. Two of them are still unknown, but one is a journalist that tortured Tahani back on Earth, and one is Simone (Kirby Howell-Baptiste), who happens to be Chidi's ex-girlfriend. Realizing he will skew the experiment, Chidi agrees to have his entire memory erased — including all memories of Eleanor (Bell), with whom he has fallen in love over several different reboots of the fake Good Place neighborhood.
Season 4 picks up right where we left off — with Eleanor introducing Chidi, who doesn't know her at all, to the neighborhood. But there's a twist: after Michael completely freaks out about the experiment at the end of the third season, Eleanor is forced to pretend to be the Architect, showing the new members of the Good Place around and acting as a leader. Early in the season 4 first-look trailer, she introduces Janet (Carden), a human-shaped supercomputer who can summon any object or information. Janet produces "a baby elephant made of pure light that tells you true secrets about the universe." When the elephant appears, it tells the resident, "Shirley Temple killed JFK!"
This is one of the only real glimpses of the fourth season of The Good Place, but the video has plenty of behind the scenes tidbits — like Jacinto saying that he took a lot of photos during the filming process for when "Ted has forgotten [him]" and he can prove that they worked together. Similarly, Jamil marveled at the fact that during her first professional acting job, she worked with a legend like Danson — carefully noting that if her performance is bad, it's actually all his fault.
The Good Place creator Michael Schur announced back in June that the series' upcoming fourth season would be its last. He explained that, while the cast and crew love working on this smart, oddball show, they didn't want to overstay their welcome; thus, he carefully planned out the story to occupy about 50 episodes total. When the show concludes after this fourteen-episode season, it will have aired 53 episodes.
The final season of The Good Place premieres on Thursday, September 26 on NBC. Thanks to its talented cast, whip-smart concept, and impeccable writing and direction (the series' second season currently holds a 100 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes, and the other two seasons are ranked at 98 and 92 percent), the series' final ride with Michael, Eleanor, Chidi, Jason, Tahani, and Janet is sure to be emotional, clever, and hilarious.