There’s already been quite a lot of chatter in Australia about “The Good Place” and its bad Aussie accents. I don’t think I’m spoiling much by pointing out that they are in part intentional according to the show’s creator, Mike Schur, who is well known for affectionate skewering in his previous creations, “Parks and Recreation,” and “Brooklyn Nine-Nine.”

We have a big profile of him in this week’s magazine, pointing out his strict “no jerks” rule on set.

But for “The Good Place,” he seems especially eager to toy with Australian-American relations, and not just with the accent: The next episode involves a restaurant called the Cowboy Skyscraper Buffet, which Mr. Schur described as “a reverse Outback Steakhouse” in which the United States has its culture misappropriated and made cliché.

I suspect Australians will like that more than the bakery in the first episode named “We Crumb From a Land Down Under.”

But what I found myself wondering as I watched both of these shows, and finished reading Liane Moriarty’s wellness-obsessed new novel, “Nine Perfect Strangers,” is whether Australia is becoming a global brand for creative escape and rejuvenation. Our dry, sunny isle far from swampy Washington seems to be the latest pinup for the American desire to check out and start over.

It reminds me a bit of Hawaii in the 1970s and ’80s (the era of “Fantasy Island,” “Gilligan’s Island,” and “Magnum P.I.”) and more recently with “Lost.” Or to go further back, it’s what Mexico was for Bob Dylan, Jack Kerouac and the Beats in the 1950s and ’60s — a place of great beauty where familiar rules and conflicts could be sidestepped or ignored.