Manny Jacinto and William Jackson Harper on the (after)life lessons they’ll take from The Good Place
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As far as modern-day TV success stories go, it’s hard not to be stunned by how The Good Place ascended from being “that weird NBC show with Veronica Mars and Ted Danson” to a show that has made us genuinely examine what it means to be a good person.
It’s something that stars Manny Jacinto and William Jackson Harper are very conscious of, especially since they still remember what it was like when they first came to the Television Critics Association press tour in 2016 to talk about Michael Schur’s oddball examination of the afterlife. This time, they were much more prepared to talk about the show and its legacy, while revealing the one strange thing they wish they’d been able to do during the show’s run. (Given how much strange stuff they did during the show’s run, that’s saying something).
The A.V. Club: Do you remember your first experience at the TCAs?
Manny Jacinto: Yeah—I remember doing the circuit and nobody wanted to talk to us. And that’s still the case, but that’s fine.
William Jackson Harper: I just remember people being like, what are we? What is this? And just having no idea what this really was and what we were supposed to do and how we were supposed to behave. Am I going to piss somebody off, you know? Now, honestly, the strange thing is being somewhat used to it.
AVC: At that point, did you know the big twist at the end of season one?
MJ: We had no clue where the first season was going. Which was probably for the best because we probably would have spoiled it right then and there.
WJH: At the time, it was one of those things where we were being asked to talk in-depth about something that we were really, really unfamiliar with. I was trying to answer questions and not appear to be aloof, but I just really didn’t know anything.
AVC: Now we’re in season four, which is focused on wrapping up these seemingly unsolvable questions about life. When you guys hit that point in this final season, how did you feel?
WJH: I felt like, okay, well, now we’ve definitely bitten off more than we can chew. There’s no way that this can be satisfying. But I think the thing is, there’s been so much research done, so much thought put into every single script about the argument that we’re making, which is consistent with the world that we set up. So I feel that it really works well. I also feel like this show still asks more questions than it answers. There are definitely answers, because there’s got to be. But it’s more about this imagined world, and it’s staying true to the story in this world that has been created over these last four years.
MJ: The way I like to look at it is that yeah, we do try and provide as best answers as we can know—not everybody has the right answer. And that’s why Mike [Schur] surrounds himself with people that are knowledgeable, whether it be the writers or the philosophy teachers and whatnot. And they try and provide the best possible answer. But I think the best part about this show is that at the end of it, the questions that come up are toward yourself and what you’re doing with your own life. We provide a final picture, and that causes people to ask more questions.
AVC: It’s not outside of the realm of possibility that 100 years from now, however people watch the things they watch, The Good Place could be considered an important religious or philosophical text. Is that something you guys think about?
MJ: Not really! What’s really interesting is universities are studying our show, in terms of trying to learn about moral philosophy. And I was contacted about linguistics, with how Jason speaks. But Will and I, we’re just telling the fart jokes in this little story. We have no idea, the repercussions of what’s happening outside of it.
WJH: There is this course at Notre Dame that follows our show and its philosophy. [Note: The course is called “The Good Class.”] It’s cool to make these concepts a little bit more accessible. Because it really did. I mean, I don’t know what I’m talking about most of the time [on the show]; I just get on Wikipedia before and I’m like, how do I not sound like I have no idea what’s coming out of my mouth. I’m just trying to get a basic sort of layman’s understanding. But I think that one of the things that the show does really well, and I think is inspiring to people, is that it takes these concepts and gives them examples to help you think about them.
AVC: Manny, what was the linguistics conversation you had with a college?
MJ: I forget the college or the university, but they’re doing a study that revolves around the idea of how Jason speaks—his intonations. And how that [affects] him in terms of how dumb he seems, but also lovable. They wanted to study those kinds of patterns, because he speaks in a very specific way, and they really were intrigued by it and wanted to study it. I don’t know what they’re gonna use it for.
AVC: Both of your characters have had extended romances over the course of the show. In terms of fitting that into the overall tone, what has that experience been like for you?
MJ: From my point of view, being an Asian-American male, you don’t always see that on screen. So that was very interesting for me, and it was almost a privilege, because you don’t get to see a lot of male Asian love interests in the media, especially in North America. And I get a lot of love for that, which is great. It’s something that we should see more again, down the line but I was able to marry D’Arcy [Carden as Janet], I was able to marry Jameela [Jamil, as Tahani]. I just wish that I could have married Will.
AVC: I’m sure there are many people on the internet who very much agree with you.
MJ: Yeah, it’s an interesting thing. I think our writers were not shy to sexualize our characters in a sense, whether it be like taking off our shirts or making us do a Magic Mike sexy dance. So we can’t take all the credit.
WJH: Sometimes the writing just takes you where it takes you, and it’s never really been hard to navigate necessarily. There’s something about the familiarity of just being on set with people 12 hours a day, where you do just fall in love with everybody a little bit. So it feels actually super-natural to just receive it. It feels very natural to say, “Oh, yeah, I could totally see what a relationship with this person would be like,” because we all like each other. So when our characters go to those places, it doesn’t feel like a leap. It feels like our characters have been in this pressure cooker for so long, and we’re the only people that they can rely on with each other and that something could blossom out of that. Just out of that proximity and that need.
AVC: Looking forward, let’s say you were able to get at least most of this team back together for a new show. What would you want that show to be?
MJ: I always tease about a Pillboi and Jason spin-off. Yeah, Pill And The Boys. That’s where my head goes. But also because of the supernatural aspect to it, I always wanted to see us switch places—Will plays the DJ and I play the professor and whatnot.
WJH: If I could work with this exact same group of people again, I would do it in a heartbeat. And I have always wanted to just take a shot at Jason.
MJ: Will would be an amazing Jason.
WJH: Manny breaks me all the time, it’s like his mission is to make me laugh. So I just want to do it to him. I want to get him back.
[Jacinto laughs.]
AVC: Well, there you go.
WJH: Yeah.
AVC: A lot of the conversations around this show have been about how it makes you think about being a better person, because it’s impossible to watch it and not think about that. What do you feel are the most important lessons you will take away from the show?
WJH: That kindness doesn’t equal naïveté. You know, I feel like any sort of impulse to just be sweet can be taken for weakness, and being around Ted [Danson] and Kristen [Bell] and Mike, that’s not at all the truth. It was really great to be around a group of people who wiped that weird, toxic thought out of my brain. So I think I’ll probably hold on to that more than anything else.
MJ: For sure. Ted and Kristen and Mike are prime examples of treating others with kindness, whether they be in the cast or a visitor or a P.A. Regardless of who you’re working with, or who you’re around, just to treat them with kindness goes a long way. And we really need it right now. It’s definitely something I’m always going to be carrying.
The series finale of The Good Place airs Thursday, January 30, 8:30 p.m. Eastern on NBC.
51 Comments
I really wish I liked The Good Place more, but I feel like I terminally bounced off of it on the last attempt. It may be that I’ve been watching 2-3 episodes at a time on Netflix, but whenever I do, the show reaches a terminal self-satisfaction at its own cleverness after about an hour and I can’t watch it again for a few weeks, at which point I’ve disinvested from the characters.
And that’s nuts, because the cast is great, the concept (on paper) is massively exciting and intriguing and a most of the gags really, really land. But as a whole I find it really smug and cloying in all but the smallest doses.
“the show reaches a terminal self-satisfaction at its own cleverness after about an hour and I can’t watch it again for a few weeks, at which point I’ve disinvested from the characters.”Agree. I have not seen it put so well as this. Kudos. I have completely given up criticizing this show at all because the hate I get in response is over-the-top uncanny. It’s a 22 minute long comedy, for pity’s sake. Not worth threatening someone’s life over…..And there’s a reason why it is difficult to really “invest” in the characters. This is a comedy, and comedies just don’t lend themselves to audience/character identification the way that dramedies/ dramas do. Comedies show us a world ‘out of proportion’, the characters are often “types.” ‘Distance’ is very important in comedy because the situations (as in gallows humor) can be too painful for ordinary discourse. Dying is a painful subject. This show deals with death in a pretty humorous way. But it has been done much, much better, imo.
‘comedies just don’t lend themselves to audience/character identification the way that dramedies/ dramas do’I was going to say, I don’t know that I agree with that. But actually what I mean is, perhaps not identification – because, as you say, comedic characters are a little broader than we’d normally like to see ourselves – but certainly empathy. I empathise with these characters, and with many comedy characters in fact, from Parks & Rec to Catastrophe, to the bizarrely underrated (under-noticed?) Flowers, immensely. Because they’re crafted with intelligence and care, and are so beautifully acted by the cast.For me, this show’s an all-timer. So smart, so funny, so audacious and flat-out delightful. But I can also see why people don’t love it, and that’s fine.
I had a different journey of feeling lukewarm about this show. I almost gave up on it in the first season because it rarely made me laugh. Then it got better, but still not great as a comedy. Then there’s the fact that 40% of the main characters (Tamilla and Jason) never evolved past one dimension. I actually think what the show does best is fantasy. I disagree with the other commenter that you can’t become invested in sitcom characters. You need look no further than Michael Schur’s masterpiece (Parks and Recreation) for proof.
Yeah, I disagree with that too. I became really invested in characters from Community and Bojack Horseman to name but two. I’ve only seen bits and pieces of Parks and Rec (I need to fix that), but I can see that being the case.
Even in really mainstream sitcoms, people got invested in the soap opera elements of Friends.
I’m really going to miss this show.
This is one of the 10 best “sitcoms” ever.
I love Top 10’s, and I recently went through my personal list of sitcoms. The Good Place made it to my No. 2 spot (B99 is my No.1 and Malcolm in the Middle is my No. 3, for whatever that’s worth.)
I would say that it is easily the best American comedy ever made.
It very well could be.
NARRATOR: It wasn’t.
Still, it’s better to have watched The Good Place and lost than to never have watched The Good Place at all.
And with it ending, I’m also probably going to miss watching network TV.
I’m literally cancelling my cable/DVR subscription next month. Now that TGP is over I don’t have any appointment-tv shows left – I can just wait for them to land on Hulu/Netflix.
Nine-Nine!
I think the season one reveal was one of the best TV moments, ever. I remember my jaw dropping to the floor and smiling so hard when Michael turned around with that evil grin. Like, I knew something was weird because it’s like, a TV comedy, but it was at that moment that I knew the writers were playing a very specific long-game. And it was exhilarating.
The beauty of the first episode is that they give it away ‘I’m in paradise and I have a stomach ache’ BUT every moment leading up to that moment had you believing it would be possible for Chidi. Then Eleanor’s confession had us believing she wasn’t supposed to be there.As sad I will be to see it end, I enjoyed every moment of this show.
Just thinking about how you assume Chidi and Tahani are meant to be in the Good Place, and they think so too, makes me realise that there’s been a thread right from the start of the show that complacency is a huge danger when you’re talking about morality. Chidi and Tahani never question the Good Place in the way that Eleanor (and sometimes Jason) does. because they think that they belong and they assume everything will run smoothly. (Tahani, for example, is miserable when she thinks her soulmate is a silent monk named Jianyu, and doesn’t question why she’s so sad in Heaven.)And that theme of complacency keeps recurring, especially in the later seasons. The Good Place committee haven’t done anything about the last 400 years of people failing to meet their standards and going to the Bad Place because that’s just the system. The Bad Place demons mostly think they’re serving a purpose by punishing the worst people in the world, but never stop to think if flattening penises does anything worthwhile. It’s only when someone challenges the perceived wisdom – ironically, Michael, a demon who wants to torture people more effectively – that things start to improve.
That reveal and the way they kept (oh god past tense hurts here) switching things up, rushing past the obvious options and generally pulling the rug out from under the audience – intelligently – have made this probably my favorite show ever. Most TV I half engage with. There’s not a whole lot on that I care about or watch in the first place, so the majority of the time the TV’s on and I’m in front of it I’m doing something else that honestly has most of my attention. Good Place broke that – every episode, on the edge of the seat, not just listening to the dialogue but watching for nuances in perfomance that might be tells for show developments and pausing the show to look for the weird background jokes and activities and then actively discussing it with my SO for days afterwards.Really gonna miss them.
LOVED that moment. My husband only saw the second half of the first season with me, once we got to the finale he was like OK we have to go back and rewatch all of that so I can pick up any clues
“NJ: I always tease about a Pillboi and Jason spin-off. Yeah, Pill And The Boys.”OH HELL YESPlease God, make this happen!
I will be pretty bummed when this show is gone after tonight, but I massively respect Mike Schur and his team of writers for telling the story they wanted to tell, how they wanted to tell it. It’s just such a gift of a short show in that it makes us think about how we treat each other as humans, while also cracking amazing jokes with the two goofballs interviewed above.Can’t wait for the extra long finale!
Tonight? Geez, you scared me there for a second that I had (once again) forgotten what day of the week it was.
We went past the filming set this summer on the Universal Tour. We saw Kristen Bell’s car. Then suddenly from nowhere Jack from will and grace walked by and waved to everyone. Good times.
Did you take 10 to get there?
Actually it was a Trolly…
Oh, man, that sounds like a problem…
I was on that same tour. Different time and date, but yeah.
We saw Ted getting into his car to leave one of the soundstages.
That’s better than Just Jack…
This show is cringeworthy, from story to dialogs, casting, VFX.
We hear so much about people who are charming onscreen behaving badly off, so it’s nice to hear that everyone on this show is actually as nice off camera as they are on. It makes sense, given how humanist and warm the show is, but not always a given.
Is it bad that I read everything that Manny says in Jason’s voice and intonations? I makes for a pleasant read and adds some weight to what he says for some reason.. haha
It was dope, by Manny Jacinto.
You know what’s weird? I was listening to a podcast episode of Mogul about a Florida pirate radio DJ (DJ Raw) and he sounded EXACTLY like Jason Mendoza. It was so odd.
It’s weird because when you actually see Manny Jacinto talk he’s so poised and intelligent and you’re like “well, I know all the rest of this cast, but who’s that guy?!” I found myself arguing with myself as I read, hearing Jason and then my brain would keep going “You know he doesn’t really talk like that, right??” Can’t help it.
I thought the show ended last week – kinda felt like they wrapped it all up. I’m intrigued now.
Manny Jacinto is very hot
He is incredibly attractive, yes.
Little overboard on the cheekbones.
Unfairly so, yes. And WJH’s “surprisingly jacked” moment was so great.
When Nicole Byer as the mail person asks Jason and Tahani “Are all humans this attractive?”No, they really are not.
Shiny happy people holding haaaaa-aaaands…
Third time is the charm…go for it!
Shiny happy people holding hands, shiny happy people holding haaaaaa-aaaaaaands…
It’s the end of the world as we know it…And everything’s fine?
Lol.
And for those who haven’t seen these already:
Considering how uncomfortable Manny and William were reading these, I’m inclined to think thirst tweets are something we as a species should maybe stop. (And showing them to the people in question definitely is.)That said, I was very entertained by the way Manny responded to the “bussy” tweet with, “I sing in the shower … maybe I can work on that so that we can … make that … happen”.
After reading your frequent The Good Place updates, I decided to go back and give the show another try. My PC is fairly speedy and I don’t have problems with Netflix or Prime. But, damn, if that streaming platform doesn’t freeze up every 30 seconds, leaving me wondering how much I missed…. I don’t even mind the commercials. Maybe if Netflix adds Season 4 to their already existing 3 Seasons….. 🙁
I’m grateful that my vision of the afterlife is nothing like this. And funnier too 😀
I feel like these two actors don’t get enough recognition for playing roles that are very challenging in a comedy. Manny has to deliver some of the most ludicrously stupid things a person could say while still sounding like a real human being, and he manages it by being totally sincere. William, on the other hand, gets large chunks of information on philosophy to deliver naturally and in an interesting way, and he nails that, mostly by tapping into a well of enthusiasm that’s very endearing.