To paraphrase Vicky, the show’s most careerist demon: damn it, Australia, you are the worst. And you can aaaaall suck it.
I don’t think I’m alone in saying that watching The Good Place is my good place. Maybe Vulture overstated things when they called the NBC series a “restorative salve for the weary, the defeated, the down-hearted” (also a great tinder bio), but maybe they didn’t.
The unique American sitcom came to us in late 2016 amidst a global resurgence of white nationalism, an endless cavalcade of torture porn branded as ‘feminist TV’ and Bob Katter, who just keeps existing, loudly. Things were bad, and The Good Place sprung unbidden to our rescue. But all of that stopped when our troubled homeland, Australia, made an appearance the show’s third season, which kicked off in September this year.
For me, the otherworldliness of The Good Place doesn’t just lie in it being set in the afterlife, but also in its effortlessly multiethnic cast.
When else have we seen the height of British pomp and excess in the form of Tahani Al-Jamil, an Oxford-educated poseur with Pakistani heritage (Jameela Jamil), instead of the customary ‘English rose’ (think Emma Blunt or Emma Watson)? When else has the idiot-with-a-heart-of-gold trope, this time in the form of failed DJ Jason Mendoza, been fulfilled by an actor who happens to be Filipino-American (Manny Jacinto)?
When else have we seen a relationship play out between two people of colour? When else have we seen three actresses of South Asian descent (Jameela Jamil, Tiya Sircar and Sunita Mani) star in the same episode of TV, without ‘race’ being a punchline or a focus point? I’ll tell you when: f**king never, you guys. F**king never. And I’m just talking about the US here. Don’t get me started on Australia.
The Good Place doesn’t dismiss ‘race’ as a non-issue, though. Nor does it yield to colour-blindness or denial. When Senegal-born Chidi (William Fitzgerald Harper) asks our white American anti-hero Eleanor (Kristen Bell) if she remembers which country he is from and she responds “is it racist if I say Africa?”, Chidi deadpans: “Yes. And Africa is not a country”. We are definitely dealing with racialised characters, here. But like creator Mike Schur’s work that came before it, which includes Parks and Recreation and Brooklyn Nine-Nine, the characters of The Good Place inhabit worlds that aren’t quite as racist as the real one we find ourselves in.
The show’s ‘post-racial’ setup probably wasn’t an accident. Alan Yang, a writer for Schur’s debut sitcom Parks and Recreation commented that the show dealt with racism by writing their non-white characters “as people”—still a revolutionary idea in an industry plagued by racial stereotyping and tokenism (not to mention whitewashing and outright invisibility).
That probably wouldn’t have been possible without showrunners like Schur (who memorably said that “six white people in heaven doesn’t sound like an interesting show to me”) and an ethnically diverse writers room.
“The way we address race is just to have characters who are diverse,” Yang said of Parks and Recreation. “I know that [post-racialism] doesn’t exist. But presenting a world like that on TV, I think there’s something to be said for that… this show is warm and about people getting along, and presenting a world where that can happen.”
The Good Place comes steeped in that same optimism. Sure, the series may be set in literal Hell, but it offers audiences an almost post-racial ‘good place’—even if the real one is yet to be seen.
The Good Place’s Aussie gap year
This brings us to the opening episodes of the third season, where the gang finally finds themselves in the bad place Australia.
Understandably, Australians everywhere (well, Twitter) felt assaulted by the weird Australian accents on offer, and it was hard not to be. It’s like a gaggle of actors were pulled from a talent agency called The American Imagination, and maybe that was the point. A letter in the New York Times mentioned that Schur is a fan of “affectionate skewering” and Schur himself has implied that the hammed-up accents were kind of deliberate. And look, it’s fine. As writer Ruby Hamad has remarked, “Australians are used to othering, not being othered”. So if any country deserves this level of pastiche, it’s probably us.
But it’s not the terrible Australian accents that were ruining The Good Place. It wasn’t even that food cart We Crumb From a Land Down Under (not helping though, you guys).
Australia ruined my experience of watching The Good Place by upending the escapism it brings about.
The Good Place always had an dreamy, otherworldly quality to it—after all, its first two seasons take place in the afterlife where our characters reckon with their mistakes, heal and attempt to become better people.
And perhaps, for some Americans, that’s what Australia is. Or at least, how we are imagined. As Damien Cave of Sydney’s New York Times bureau offered: “Our dry, sunny isle far from swampy Washington seems to be the latest pinup for the American desire to check out and start over.” Cave also quoted critic James Poniewozic who spoke of an American longing for Australia as a “remote site for pilgrimages”.
With that in mind, it makes perfect sense for our far-flung island to be chosen as a sort of ephemeral stopgap to ease US audiences back to earth.
But for Australian audiences, or specifically, me—the show’s jaunt to Sydney brought about a dissonance that I just couldn’t shake.
How Sydney rained on my Good Place parade
It’s hard not to see that Australia seems to be getting more racist by the day. Just this year, an Australian cartoonist made international headlines for a piece that wouldn’t look out of place in a Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia. A senator tried to move a motion entitled ‘it’s OK to be white’ in a parliament made up of white politicians. And some of our most respected journalists tripped over themselves to support a white supremacist’s right to ‘free speech’ (a right that obviously includes a paid spot at all festivals—didn’t ya know?).
That’s why seeing The Good Place land on our shores, a show quietly steeped in post-racial optimism, sent pangs of discomfort up my spine. It was like bumping into an Aussie backpacker in a far-flung corner of Bolivia. “Oh god, it’s YOU,” I’d think. “I’m trying to have a break”.
And while The Good Place’s Australia came off like a fever dream of American projections, it still looked more like Australia than much of the television programming we dish out ourselves. Obvious examples include The Bachelor (Australia), Neighbours and Home & Away, but the same can be said for more ‘respectable’ favourites like Please Like Me and Rake. Of course, recent programming like Cleverman, Black Comedy and The Family Law are disrupting that landscape, but mainstream change isn’t coming fast enough. Aussies may wince at being misrepresented by our American overlords, but we’re less willing to admit that we misrepresent ourselves.
That’s what made the Australian chapter of The Good Place so unsettling to watch. The cast looks more like a group of friends in Sydney than anything I’ve seen on local TV. Except (and I say this in the spirit of this haiku from Wayne’s World) they’re not Australian. And that’s not Australia. Even Simone (Kirby Howell-Baptiste), the show’s only fleshed-out Australian character, happens to be a Black woman.
The show’s rendering of Australia may have been intentionally farcical in its distortions, but they’ve done a better job of showing what Australia looks like than we have. The disconnect between the most diverse TV of our time against the backdrop of a country that seems to be getting more outlandishly racist every day —that really made my head hurt.
Thankfully, the show’s Sydney chapter is probably over for good—the gang have since stopped by the US, Hungary and Canada only to die again and re-enter the afterlife. Our four antiheroes have now been flagged as ‘interdimensional fugitives’, Sydney is out of the picture, and The Good Place feels right again.
The season 3 finale left audiences on tenterhooks—the gang may finally be in the ‘good place’—but we’ll have to wait for season 4 to know for sure. There’s one thing that I’m willing to bet on, though: the ‘good place’ isn’t Australia.
About the author
Reena Gupta is a Melbourne-based freelance writer of South Asian heritage. Her work has appeared in New Matilda, Overland and Medium, and she can be tweeted at @purpletank.
1 Comment
I don’t know how to respond to this as an American of color who has lived in Australia. I really do not want to dismiss your point of view. Or say that your racial problems are trivial compared to ours.
But with two public broadcasters each with multiple channels and radio stations, plus your INCREDIBLY multicultural suburbs…Australia really did feel like “what American could be if we got our shit together” Especially in this era of Trump.
I know Scomo sucks. I know indigenous Australians still suffer. But you thank the traditional owners before every public event, we ignore our indigenous people. You are having a debate about Australia day. July 4th and that there is even a history before our “first fleet” the pilgrims showed up is not debated at all.
I think it’s great (and not in a patronizing way) that so many people like you are constantly calling out Australia’s shortcomings, (The price of freedom is eternal vigilance after all) but to Americans, Australia really does feel like as good as it can get. It’s California with clean air.
Just explaining that point of view. Again, I hope you don’t feel as if I’m trivializing Australia’s problems. And racism. But despite the stereotype, Australia seems to be much more self aware and honest about its racism than America does. Even in the age of Black Lives Matter and so many new social movements coming from here, I felt like the smart people in Australia are a lot smarter than our smart people. You speak in complete sentences on ABC RN. On NPR, they’re afraid to take a side because Republicans will throw a fit. Seriously your conservative party is so much better than ours. Your labor and Green parties are so much better than our left wing parties. And thankfully, 2GB does not reach as many people as Fox News does here.
I’m not super articulate and I’m not really sure what I’m trying to achieve with this. Except to express that Australia in 2019 is heaven for so many Americans right now suffering under the Trump regime.