As Emmy nominations approach, Vanity Fair’s HWD team is once again diving deep into how some of this season’s greatest scenes and characters came together. You can read more of these close looks here.

Janet, The Good Place

When The Good Place creator Mike Schur began imagining his vision of the afterlife, he pictured a multifaceted universe of disparate realms that were connected by some unifying feature. At first, it was a kiosk-like structure that contained all the knowledge in the universe. But soon, he realized that a person would be a far more interesting vessel for all that information and wisdom. Thus, the kiosk transformed into Janet: a not-quite-human, not-quite-animatronic guide to life after death, played by D’Arcy Carden.

“That has proven to be the best decision I made, I think,” Schur added in a recent interview. He’s particularly happy that he made Janet a corporeal being, “instead of a disembodied computer voice like Alexa or something. . . . Every time we go to a new place, there’s a possibility that there is a new Janet. It’s really fun.”

In a lot of ways, Janet is the glue that holds together The Good Place—a multi-layered comedy that follows four recently deceased people from different corners of the world (the United States, Senegal, England . . . Florida). At first, all four believe they have been sent to “the Good Place,” this universe’s answer to heaven—though it soon becomes clear that their reality is slightly more complicated than that. (And if you haven’t watched the show yet, you’ll probably want to stop reading right about now.) At the end of Season 1, the quartet—Eleanor (Kristen Bell), Chidi (William Jackson Harper), Tahani (Jameela Jamil), and Jason (Manny Jacinto)—realize that their “Good Place” is actually “the Bad Place,” and that its architect, Michael (Ted Danson) is not a benevolent angel but a demonic torture artist. Janet, meanwhile, is one of this world’s few truly innocent players—an all-knowing guide programmed, simply, to be helpful.

So, who, or what, is Janet, really? She’s not human, not machine, not alive, not dead. As Schur put it, “We’ve sort of zeroed in on her by cutting away the stuff that isn’t her.” Actors of all ages, ethnicities, genders, sizes, and shapes auditioned for the role—including 16-year-old J.J. Totah, who currently stars in NBC’s Champions. Each actor read a scene written specifically for the tryout—all the better to keep The Good Place’s secrets a secret—in which Janet had been reimagined as a kind of customer-service agent for a disreputable company. As Schur reasoned, an all-knowing not-robot would have to be facile with language—and know how to calmly navigate questions from irate humans. When D’Arcy Carden showed up, Schur knew he’d found his Janet. “She made the robotic language that I had written for the dummy scene seem like a real person was doing it,” he said. “She found this weird humanity inside this robotic scene.”

O.K.—but why name her Janet? Simple: when Schur writes scripts, he defaults to calling his characters “Jim” and “Janet” until he can think of something better. In this case, the provisional name stuck. Which is appropriate, since Schur’s method means the name “Janet” has taken on a grander, more ubiquitous meaning for him—it’s the ideal term for an omniscient character, someone who is everything and nothing all at once.

How She Came to Life

Season 2 of The Good Place began with a frantic Michael “rebooting” the afterlife he had constructed over and over again, each time Eleanor and co. figured out the truth about “the Good Place”—which meant that he also had to repeatedly kill a frantic Janet. Each time she died, she awoke a more complicated being—taking character development to a new level. At this point, Janet is not merely a souped-up Siri; she’s a bottomless database, an astral train operator, a hero with otherworldly strength and the ability to retrieve any object in an instant. As demon Shawn (Marc Evan Jackson) proves, she can even be used as a walkie-talkie in a pinch. (“I remember the first time we did that in Season 1,” Carden said in an interview. “Marc was being like, very respectful and was a foot away from me . . . after the first take I was like, ‘Marc, get up in there. Do not be afraid. Put your mouth inside of my mouth.’”)