How do hands move in heaven? Ted Danson knows. Watch him in “The Good Place,” NBC’s circle-squaring philosophical sitcom about life, death, good, evil, redemption and frozen yogurt. As Danson speaks, his hands flutter and hover in front of him like a pair of trained birds. They poke and swirl, pinch and twist. They snap suddenly ahead to accent a word as if they’re plucking a feather from a passing breeze. Danson is tall and slim — he was a basketball star growing up — and his hands are expressively large. He can move them, when he needs to, with the long-fingered languor of Michelangelo’s God reaching out to touch Adam. On the show, Danson plays an “architect” of the afterlife named Michael, a sort of immortal Willy Wonka who dresses in bright suits and bow ties. He is always flying into spasms of delight over the fascinating novelties of human culture — paper clips, suspenders, karaoke, Skee-Ball — and in one scene he gets so celestially excited that he lunges into a squat, holds his arms out in front of him and gyrates his wrists like an electric mixer on full blast. “How do you pump your fist again?” he asks. “Is this it?”

Danson is now 70, roughly twice the age he was when he started on “Cheers,” and he carries his seniority around as if it were the funniest thing in the world. In recent years, he has put together a virtuosic run of performances, including supporting roles in shows such as “Damages,” “Bored to Death” and “Fargo.” His turn on “The Good Place” seems like a culmination of this late-phase greatness: a role he was born, and then very carefully aged, to play. Although Danson still has the seductive good looks of Sam Malone, his hair has gone chalk white, and he delivers his lines with an ease so deep it looks effortless and instinctive — the kind of thing you couldn’t practice if you tried.

In May, I happened to be on the set of “The Good Place,” watching the making of an episode of Season 3, when Danson arrived. They were filming that day inside an obscenely large mansion in Beverly Hills — the kind of gaudy faux-French superpalace you would find, in fact, by Googling the words “obscenely large mansion.” Danson walked in wearing a white suit jacket, munching on a bag of snacks. All around him was chaos. Bearded men with multicolored rolls of tape hanging from their belts hauled clattering carts past extras in formal wear holding glasses of fake red wine. Danson worked his way cheerfully through the noise. He wove past the ballroom’s titanic staircase and the giant kitchen with its archipelago of separate islands and the fireplace wide enough to consume whole small trees. I was excited to watch him step in front of the camera and do what I imagined would be his automatic Ted Danson thing.

Instead, still munching his snacks, Danson slipped into one of the mansion’s back rooms. It, too, was crowded, full of people chatting and laughing, looking at their phones, watching monitors, ignoring the set’s constant calls of “shhhhhhhh.” Danson found an empty folding chair in the far corner and sat. He became very still. He started to speak softly, under his breath, whispering inaudible words into the space directly in front of him. Soon his large hands rose, poking and swirling, and then they fell, and then they rose, and then they fell. Danson was fine-tuning, move by move, the components of his next scene. He gripped the air in front of him and folded it like dough. It looked, at times, as if he were conducting his own invisible orchestra. I watched Danson do this, silently, for nearly half an hour. He may have gone on longer — he was still rehearsing, in total focus, when I had to go off and do something else.

Maybe it’s faint praise to call a show the best sitcom on TV. It’s like calling a vehicle the best horse buggy on the autobahn. Sitcoms no longer sit anywhere near the vital center of American culture. We are not a nation of families squeezing onto couches to watch can’t-miss programming. Our entertainment metabolisms have sped up and scattered in a thousand directions.

The cast of ‘‘The Good Place,’’ from left: Manny Jacinto, Jameela Jamil, Ted Danson, D’Arcy Carden, William Jackson Harper and Kristen Bell. Jeff Minton for The New York Times

And yet the fact remains. “The Good Place” — the story of a group of recently deceased earthlings navigating the afterlife — is the best sitcom on TV. It is, in many ways, charmingly old-fashioned: a 22-minute glossy confection of family-friendly LOLs, featuring beautiful multicultural characters with perfect hair trading tightly scripted jokes as they learn life lessons. Grandchildren and grandparents could watch it together in relative comfort, laughing in heartwarming unison.

But the show is also, by network standards, quite radical. It attempts a clever gambit. The American sitcom, since its inception, has struggled with a fundamental tension at its core. Let’s call it “jester vs. guru.” We expect half-hour comedies to pull off an impossible double duty: to both inject jokes into the national bloodstream and to enlighten us with high-minded moral instruction. We want not only zany catchphrases but wise life lessons. The history of the form has been a constant tug of war between these two contradictory demands. Early sitcoms tended toward Very Special Episodes — morality plays in which we learned to honor our parents, say no to drugs and rat out even our most charming friends. The sitcoms that followed rebelled against such ham-fisted piety, replacing it with ironic cynicism. “Seinfeld” famously rejected the moral duties of the sitcom altogether; “30 Rock” was a pure fire hose of laughs. The control knob turned, further and further, from wisdom toward jokes.

“The Good Place” tries, improbably, to fulfill both functions at once. It wants to sit at both ends of the control knob simultaneously. Like any good modern comedy, the show is a direct IV of laughs, but the trick is that all of those laughs are explicitly about morality.

The premise of “The Good Place” is absurdly high concept. It sounds less like the basis of a prime-time sitcom than an experimental puppet show conducted, without a permit, on the woodsy edge of a large public park. The show’s action begins in a candy-colored heaven in which new residents are welcomed to find their perfect soul mate, an ideal home and an eternal supply of frozen yogurt. (Flavors include Double Rainbow, Four-Day Weekend, Full Cellphone Battery, Panoply of Exuberance and Beyoncé Compliments Your Hair.) There is just one problem: Eleanor Shellstrop, our foulmouthed protagonist, does not belong anywhere near any kind of paradise. Eleanor is a comically awful person — in flashbacks, we see her refusing to be a designated driver, ruining a stranger’s quinceañera and selling fake medicine to the elderly. Her arrival at the Good Place seems to be a result of some kind of existential clerical error. Eleanor is understandably reluctant to confess this, particularly when she learns about the many horrors of the Bad Place: bees with teeth, four-headed bears, volcanoes full of scorpions and — unfortunately — “butthole spiders.” Out of sheer desperation, she decides to try something drastic: to improve herself. Eleanor manages to persuade her alleged soul mate, a Senegalese professor of ethics and moral philosophy named Chidi, to teach her how to be good. “How do we do it?” she asks. “Is there a pill I can take or something I can vape?”

This is the trick of “The Good Place.” Ethics is not some kind of moralistic byproduct; it’s baked into the very premise. The show is entirely life lessons. Every episode is Very Special. It synthesizes those old contradictory impulses — jester vs. guru — so completely that they cease to be in tension. If “Seinfeld” was a show about nothing, “The Good Place” is a show about everything — including, and especially, growing and learning. By all rights, it should probably be awful — preachy, awkward, tedious, wooden, labored and out of touch. Instead, it is excellent: a work of popular art that hits on many levels at once. It has been not only critically acclaimed but also widely watched, especially on streaming services, where its twists and intricate jokes lend themselves to bingeing and rebingeing. The modern world, perhaps, is hungrier for ethics than we have been led to believe.

Back in the mansion, sometime after his private rehearsal session, Ted Danson thanked me, very sincerely, for coming to write about “The Good Place.” Then he corrected himself. “Well,” he said, “thanks for coming to write about Mike.” He was referring to Michael Schur, the show’s creator and driving force. I told Danson I wasn’t there to write just about Schur; I was there to write about the whole show. But Danson waved this off with one of his big, elegant hands. “It’s all Mike,” he told me. “We’re all just a bunch of little Mikes.”

Ted Danson plays an ‘‘architect’’ of the afterlife. Jeff Minton for The New York Times

As Michael is to the Good Place, Michael Schur is to “The Good Place” — the architect with everything on the line. (It is surely no coincidence that Schur named Ted Danson’s character after himself.) While the episode was being shot at the mansion, Schur was sitting five miles away, in his bungalow on the back lot of Universal Studios, worrying. He was thinking forward and backward, checking and rechecking his work, trying to exist in 10 different time signatures at once. Putting a TV show together — any TV show — is a crushing logistical nightmare. There are pitches and drafts and scripts and casting calls and table reads and revisions and rehearsals and budgets. You have to scout locations and then unleash huge quasi-military mobilizations of equipment. On top of which, “The Good Place” offers its own unique challenges. Its plot is an ongoing logic puzzle with twists that have to work across several different dimensions, and the integrity of that puzzle sometimes keeps Schur up at night.

Schur grew up in Connecticut and has a classic New England comedy pedigree: president of The Harvard Lampoon, staff writer on “Saturday Night Live.” He is now 42. He has a boyish face on a squarish head, and his thick, dark hair is brushed at the temples with white. He speaks in earnest, open paragraphs, with the clear pleasure of someone who enjoys exploring his own brain. “To be totally honest,” he says as soon as I step into his office, “I’m having a hard time gauging whether I’m O.K. with being a writer who has a vintage typewriter on his coffee table.” (It was a gift.) Our conversation covered the prodigious gifts of Kristen Bell — “She just has a really low center of gravity for how she approaches her job; you can give her 40 notes on a line, and she’ll go, ‘Yep, got it,’ and she’ll do all 40 of those notes at once” — and Schur’s own struggle with what he calls directional insanity: “If I don’t put a tremendous amount of concentration into it, I will get lost even going from my office to my house.” He lamented the persistence of toxic masculinity in show business. “People in general are far too tolerant of bad behavior,” he told me, “because they think it’s necessary for creativity. But I don’t think you should ever think they are one and the same.”

Schur is famous in the industry for his policy of — as he puts it in polite company — “no jerks.” This applies to every level of every project, from writers to directors to actors, and people say it is life-changing; there is a dedicated group of talent that follows Schur from show to show. His rise to network power has corresponded with a new tone in prime-time comedy, an era of good-hearted humanistic warmth. One of Schur’s signature early achievements was helping NBC, as part of the writing team, transform the original British version of “The Office” — the revered but bitterly cynical BBC mockumentary — into its softer American incarnation. The show flipped the ratio of cringing to pleasure and ran for nine seasons. Afterward, Schur co-created “Parks and Recreation,” which took the humanistic impulse even further. It was a sort of course correction from the shows Schur grew up on, the irony-drenched sitcoms of the 1990s.

“I’m not a huge fan of the ‘Seinfeld’ era, personally,” he told me. “I liked it when it was on — it broke the form and put it back together in this new way, and it was revolutionary and wonderful, and I consumed it like candy. But I don’t find the urge to go back and watch it again. It’s like doing a crossword puzzle for the second time. I think there’s a reason that shows where there is growth and learning are more rewatchable.”

A few years ago, after all of Schur’s success, NBC offered him a dream opportunity: total freedom for his next project. He was ambitious enough to see this not only as an opportunity but as a perverse creative challenge. Schur is a big literary-fiction reader, and he loves formal experimentation, and he especially reveres the late American writer David Foster Wallace — another innovator obsessed with goodness. In his office, Schur keeps various Wallace quotes for inspiration. One, from a 1993 interview, reads like a mission statement for “The Good Place”:

Look, man, we’d probably most of us agree that these are dark times, and stupid ones, but do we need fiction that does nothing but dramatize how dark and stupid everything is? In dark times, the definition of good art would seem to be art that locates and applies CPR to those elements of what’s human and magical that still live and glow despite the times’ darkness. Really good fiction could have as dark a worldview as it wished, but it’d find a way both to depict this world and to illuminate the possibilities for being alive and human in it.

The idea that excited Schur, for his next sitcom, was both simple and infinitely complex: what it means to be a good person. It was an idea he had been obsessed with in different forms for many years — and that had crystallized for him back in 2005, when Jennifer Philbin, who is now his wife, got into a very minor traffic accident with a man driving a Saab. No one was hurt, and no visible damage was done, and yet the incident would become, Schur later wrote, “one of the most interesting and complicated events of my adult life.” When the Saab driver filed what Schur thought was an unnecessary insurance claim and demanded $836 for bumper damage, Schur countered with a grandly high-minded alternative. If the man would drop his claim, Schur said, he would donate the $836 to victims of Hurricane Katrina. Schur’s plan went viral, and friends and supporters jumped in to pledge more than $30,000 — an incredible philanthropic victory — and yet Schur began to feel a growing sense of unease. He suspected that his mission was not, perhaps, entirely righteous. There was an element of grandstanding to the gesture, of moral one-upmanship, and Schur spoke about it with his family and colleagues and even professors of ethics. He became fascinated by the ways people can rack up ethical credits and debits all at the same time. This, eventually, would become the subject of his show.

Goodness is a notoriously difficult topic — a tangled knot at which religions and philosophers have been picking for all of human history. A 22-minute network comedy seems like exactly the wrong tool for the job. It’s like trying to hammer a nail with a banana peel. And yet that was the tool that Michael Schur had. So he was going to try.

William Jackson Harper, who plays Chidi Anagonye, a professor of ethics and moral philosophy. Jeff Minton for The New York Times

Schur’s initial premise, in true sitcom fashion, was a kind of joke. What if life was, ethically speaking, a sort of video game — if every action had a point value, positive or negative, and the goal was to rack up the highest score? This is where “The Good Place” started. In the show’s first episode, during Michael’s orientation session, you can read dozens of scored behaviors, positive and negative, on his celestial presentation board: everything from “pet a lamb” (+0.89 points), “remember sister’s birthday” (+15.02) and “save a child from drowning” (+1,202.33) to “stiff a waitress” (-6.83), “disturb coral reef with flipper” (-53.83) and “poison a river” (-4,010.55).

Then things got complicated. As Schur began to plan the show, he embarked on an intense program of philosophical self-education. He read the classics (Aristotle, Mill, Bentham, Rawls) and hunted new academic papers online. He compiled thick reading packets and gave them to colleagues. He started to wish that he could go back to college to study philosophy full time. Philbin, who is also a writer, was overwhelmed by the number of boxes arriving at their front door. One night, she walked into the bedroom, brushing her teeth, to find Schur in bed studying a slim black book with a raven on its cover — the title of which was simply “Death.” (“What do we make of ourselves,” the book asks, “if the death that undermines us is a necessary feature of our lives being worthwhile?”)

“This show is going to ruin my life, isn’t it?” she asked.

One day out of the blue, Pamela Hieronymi, a professor at U.C.L.A., got an email from Schur, asking if she would speak to him about ethics. Hieronymi is not a TV watcher and had no idea who Schur was, but she agreed, and they ended up talking for three hours, largely about whether it is possible to become a good person by trying — about how intention and motivation color our moral behavior. Hieronymi was impressed by Schur’s earnestness and curiosity. It was clear that he didn’t just want to make jokes about philosophy; he wanted to actually understand the ideas. Eventually, Schur asked Hieronymi to join the show as a “consulting philosopher” — surely a first in sitcom history. Later he brought on Todd May, the author of that slim book about death. The consultants spoke not only to Schur but also to the writers’ room, giving lectures on existentialism and the famous thought experiment known as the Trolley Problem, ideas which were later woven into the show. All of which is to say “The Good Place” is not about philosophy in the way that “The Big Bang Theory” is about science — as a set of clichés to tap for silly jokes. A sitcom is not a grad school seminar, obviously, so the philosophy is highly abridged. But it is not insubstantial, and philosophical ideas actually determine and shape the plot.

At the beginning of Episode 6, Chidi holds up a book: a thick academic paperback with one of those devastatingly quiet covers (earth tones, Morandi still-life) that make you feel as if you will never be allowed to leave the library again.

Eleanor reads its title aloud — “What We Owe to Each Other” — and gasps.

“I saw this movie!” she says. “Laura Linney cries in a lake house because Jude Law left her for his ex-wife’s ghost.”

This synopsis, of course, is incorrect. The book is actually a dense work of philosophy by the Harvard emeritus professor T.M. Scanlon. It introduces an idea called “contractualism.” As Chidi explains it to Eleanor: “Imagine a group of reasonable people are coming up with the rules for a new society. ... But anyone can veto any rule that they think is unfair.” (“Well, my first rule would be that no one can veto my rules,” Eleanor responds, to which Chidi counters, “That’s called tyranny, and it’s generally frowned upon.”)

Jameela Jamil. Jeff Minton for The New York Times

The book seeks to explain how human societies might find moral authority without appealing to a deity or inherited laws. The answer comes from a sort of idealized social negotiation — the process of thinking, in good faith, with a community of other good-faith thinkers. As Scanlon puts it: “Thinking about right and wrong is, at the most basic level, thinking about what could be justified to others on grounds that they, if appropriately motivated, could not reasonably reject.”

Pamela Hieronymi introduced Schur to “What We Owe to Each Other”; Scanlon was her dissertation adviser at Harvard. It was the perfect way to deepen the show’s original premise — that mechanistic notion of an ethical points system. It was richer, Hieronymi argued, to think of morality in terms of cooperative human relationships — the way networks of people, with their interdependencies and conflicts, have to find a way to coexist and sacrifice and treat one another with respect. In such messy human environments, ethical choices rarely map directly onto obvious results. There are no leader boards. The problems can be almost infinitely complex.

Schur loved not only the central thesis of “What We Owe to Each Other” but also the book’s title. “It assumes that we owe things to each other,” he told me. “It starts from that place. It’s not like: Do we owe anything to each other? It’s like: Given that we owe things to each other, let’s try to figure out what they are. It’s a very quietly subversive idea.”

It is, in a way, deeply un-American — an affront to our central mythology of individual rights, self-interest and the sanctity of the free market. As an over-the-top avatar of all our worst impulses, Eleanor is severely allergic to any notion of community. And yet her salvation will turn out to depend on the people around her, all of whom will in turn depend on her. What makes us good, Chidi tells her, is “our bonds to other people and our innate desire to treat them with dignity.” As the show progresses, “What We Owe to Each Other” becomes a recurring character, popping up onscreen at several crucial plot points. This amazed Hieronymi — the last thing she had expected to see was her dissertation adviser’s book featured prominently on a network sitcom.

Watching at home, Hieronymi was pleased with the show’s evolution. “What’s going to save the characters is the relationships they have with one another,” she said. “That seems exactly right to me.”

The cast of “The Good Place” is its own little experiment in contractualism. Ted Danson and Kristen Bell are, in different ways, Hollywood royalty — experienced, award-winning, brand-name celebrities. By contrast, the show’s other core actors are so new to the business that everyone on set refers to them, affectionately, as “the babies.” Jameela Jamil, who plays a magnetically self-absorbed British socialite named Tahani, had never acted before her audition. Manny Jacinto was a hip-hop dancer before he landed the part of Jason, a scene-stealing doofus from Florida. William Jackson Harper and D’Arcy Carden, who play Chidi and a heavenly version of Siri named Janet, were both in their mid 30s and had given up on dreams of mainstream acting success. (Carden says she still has frequent “daymares,” driving home from the set, that none of this is really happening.) And yet the actors on “The Good Place” seem to coexist in a spirit of radical egalitarianism. The younger actors notice Danson arriving early to obsessively work on his scenes, despite the fact that he is literally Ted Danson. And they notice that Kristen Bell memorizes not only her own lines but everyone else’s too, and that she reads all the crazy philosophical course packets Schur sends out, so that she can discourse at length about moral particularism vs. the categorical imperative.

D’Arcy Carden and Manny Jacinto. Jeff Minton for The New York Times

Making a sitcom is incredibly tedious. Every scene is repeated infinite times, with tiny variations — and then the cameras are moved and the scene is repeated infinitely again. On set, Bell is a technician, precise and rational and systematic. She has a bright, quick energy, and she can change direction, multiple times, in a single line. In the mansion, I watched her working and reworking a scene in which Eleanor has a meltdown — a moment of insecurity that escalates into an angry retreat. Bell is small, barely five feet tall, and she was dressed that day in jeans and a pink sweatshirt. In the middle of the mansion’s chaos, she seemed like the rock-solid center around which everything else rotated.

I watched her perform the same scene over and over, take by take, as if she were slowly turning up an emotional dial. The writer of the episode, Joe Mande, stood a few yards away, with one headphone on and one off, mouthing the script as Bell performed it. D’Arcy Carden watched on a monitor and shook her head. “What a lil’ squirt,” she muttered. “She’s so good.” After many takes, Bell reached what she called her “big” take — one in which her rising anger basically blew the gilded doors off the room. (Later, editors would patch pieces of these performances together, deciding which precise emotional shades served the episode best.) Before storming out of the room, Bell had to rip out a chunk of a giant cake with her hands, and she approached that task with similar precision. She tried it standing on one side of the table and then the other, with one hand and then two, pulling the chunk violently up or dragging it straight back. “I want a rough rip,” she declared finally. The cake was huge, and there were only two backups, so it was important not to mess it up. But Bell needed only one cake. The rip, indeed, was rough.

Why is such a strange show so popular? There are, of course, many reasons. There are the hundreds of hours of effort that go into Ted Danson’s fleeting hand gestures, as well as the hundreds of hours of reading that undergird Schur’s understanding of philosophical ideas. But a bigger reason might just be about timing. The sitcom is arguably the defining commercial art form of the American 20th century. Here in the ugly adolescence of the 21st century, “The Good Place” is using that old artistic form to take an honest moral accounting of the modern American soul. In doing so, it raises questions that have always been essential but that now glow with a special radioactivity.

Imagine, if you will, that a person, or a group of people, have done something bad. They have knowingly chosen to gain an advantage at the expense of someone else. Perhaps they lied to potential investors about a building’s actual value. Maybe they bullied the vulnerable and then laughed. Or maybe it was something worse: They took an entire continent from its indigenous peoples. They enslaved, tortured, kidnapped, murdered, lied, stole. Maybe the people who benefited from all these various crimes are also willing to argue, strenuously, that none of it actually happened — or that if it did happen, it didn’t matter, or even that it was all actually for the good. Maybe these people have managed, through further bad actions, to put themselves into positions of power, where they will have outsize influence on everything that happens next.

Can a person, or a nation, that finds itself in such a situation — can it ever change? Is such deep badness redeemable? Is there any hope?

In a low moment, I mentioned to Hieronymi that American culture seems to have abandoned ethics. She disagreed strongly. “It’s amazing to me how moralized and moralistic we seem to be,” she said, “especially right now. It’s just a cultural blamefest.” All the arguments that rage every day across social media and cable news — racism, reverse racism, statutes of limitations, reparations — are fundamentally about ethics. Even the top-down distractions meant to derail these conversations are conducted under the guise of earnest concern for right and wrong. “I think that’s got to be part of the popularity of ‘The Good Place,’ ” Hieronymi said.

Michael Schur hands out philosophical readings with his scripts. Jeff Minton for The New York Times

Schur told me he wants to stress, in his show, the hard work of morality. So much of our ethical life is about thankless grinding drudgery, daily feats of internal strength, a constant invisible resistance.

“It feels, all the time in life, like a bad decision is right in front of you,” Schur said. “No matter who you are, there’s the opportunity to make bad decisions and hurt people. And it takes work just to keep not making those bad decisions. It takes a lot of concentrated effort to do the right thing all the time. Hopefully, you get so used to it, and it becomes such a part of who you are, that it doesn’t take work — you’re on autopilot making good decisions. But not always, and for a lot of people, not ever. You don’t have to look very hard to see a group of people in this country who have given in and are just making the worst decisions you can make. Like the most selfish, the most corrupt, the most evil decisions — and they’re just doing it as a matter of course. And it’s way too late. They’re never gonna go the other way.”

In the face of so much badness, Schur said, it is always tempting to give up. But the heroic thing is simply to try.

“You have to work at it, every day,” he said. “It’s so hard. The temptation will always be there to go: ‘Oh, no one’s watching. No one’s looking. I’ll just do this.’ Whatever ‘this’ is. If you throw a coffee cup at a garbage can and you miss, you could just walk away. The amount of bad you put into the universe is very minimal. But someone else is gonna have to come along and pick that thing up, and it sucks. It’s not that person’s problem, it’s your problem. And it’s a very slippery slope. As you get accustomed to one kind of bad action as permissible, then the Overton window shifts, right?

“And now the next thing is like, whatever — you cheat on your taxes. And you get away with it, because government bureaucracy is bad at picking up on tiny errors people make. And you’re like: All right, nobody got hurt. Because you’re not thinking about the school 82 miles away that couldn’t afford new textbooks because they didn’t get enough tax revenue and had to lower the school budget. All you’re thinking about is, I saved $400 by cheating on my taxes, that’s pretty cool. The window just keeps shifting, and eventually you become the kind of person who is making the bad, selfish, wrong decision by default instead of the good one. And then 15 years have gone by.”

As he wrote this new season of “The Good Place,” Schur couldn’t get an image out of his head. It was a scene from the end of “Saving Private Ryan” in which Tom Hanks, moments after being shot in the chest out in the middle of the battlefield, turns to see a German tank rumbling toward him. Bullets are pinging all around him, and the battle is clearly lost, and he is almost certainly going to die. He is absolutely not going to stop a tank. But in that moment, he decides to try. Hanks takes out his little handgun and, arm trembling, fires bullet after bullet at the oncoming tank.

“It’s the weirdest source material,” Schur said, “but it is a good analogy. That’s the essence of ‘The Good Place’ — to put people in a very difficult situation and have them say: ‘What’s the next thing we can do? What’s the next thing we can do?’ To point out that there’s more value in trying than in not trying, basically. I don’t want to spoil anything, but in the third season the characters get to a point where they have a choice. Do you give up or do you try? And they decide to try. And that is what the whole season is like. We’ll keep trying as long as we can. We’ll keep trying. No one is perfect. No one will ever win the race to be the best person. It’s impossible. But, especially since starting this show, I just think everyone should try harder. Including me.”