But what I kept coming back to over the course of “Whenever You’re Ready,” Thursday night’s transcendent one-hour finale, was how much The Good Place also functioned as a metaphor for television itself, with its godlike creators, its capricious fans (Maya Rudolph’s Judge Gen foremost among them), its formulaic constraints, and its inherent potential. Both the secret hell-dimension of the Good Place and the comedy The Good Place begin with the premise of four entirely dissimilar people being brought together in a place that they believe is heaven. Eleanor (played by Kristen Bell) is an “Arizona dirtbag” whose higher purpose on Earth began and ended with tequila and celebrity-baby plastic-surgery magazines. Chidi (William Jackson Harper) is a pathologically indecisive moral-philosophy professor. Tahani (Jameela Jamil) is a name-dropping socialite obsessed with luxury and status. Jason (Manny Jacinto) is a Floridian doofus defined by his love for wings, Molotov cocktails, and the Jacksonville Jaguars.

In the Good Place and in their roles as TV characters, these people are supposed to torture one another for the entertainment of the people watching—their demon overlords, and us, the viewers at home. It’s the setup of sitcoms and reality shows since time immemorial: Put some contrasting characters or odd couples together and watch them drive one another crazy. When The Good Place revealed its big twist at the end of Season 1, the show got more interesting but also more meta. How would heaven reboot itself? Could the series function outside its carefully constructed premise? What might happen without the specific formula of the original configuration?

Schur apparently came up with the idea for The Good Place after watching the first season of The Leftovers, Damon Lindelof’s masterful HBO drama about a world experiencing the aftermath of a Rapture-like event. After setting up a meeting with Lindelof through his agent, Schur pitched him The Good Place and asked for guidance. Lindelof’s advice was to plan everything strategically ahead of time, so that the show would never feel like its components weren’t part of some grand design. To truly sell a fictional universe, in other words, the TV showrunner has to have a godlike vision and commitment to a concept.

No matter where and when The Good Place’s characters found themselves—heaven, hell, Australia—their fundamental inquiry remained the same: How can humans help one anther be better? On the show, Chidi taught his friends the basics of the trolley problem, the categorical imperative, contractualism. And as the series went on, Schur and his writers revealed how its own guiding philosophical principle had changed from Sartre’s No Exit (“Hell is other people”) to the title of a Season 4 episode: “Help Is Other People.”