Comfort television has been one of our best and most effective escapes from a crumbling world over the past 10 years. No one does it better than Michael Schur.
From the hopeful take on local government in Parks and Recreation, to the rosy view of modern policing in Brooklyn Nine-Nine, to the existentially conflicted but fundamentally positive musing on a life lived in The Good Place, Schur's works are defined by their relentless optimism. For all our moral frailties, these shows assert, people are basically all right.
"I think it's ... subconscious or organic or whatever you want to call it," Schur said during a recent phone interview looking back over his past decade of work. "I keep changing the setting and location and theme and idea of the show that I'm working on, and then that opens the door to tell new kinds of stories that are along the same central spine."
Schur's work of the 2010s especially is defined by a relentless positivity feels downright refreshing in 2019. While a sociopathic U.S. president raves on social media and divisive politics tear families apart, TV shows like The Good Place are dependable sources of comfort. Their inherent wholesomeness hearkens back to a time when disagreement wasn't an act of ideological war.
Cranking through reruns of Parks and Rec or Nine-Nine is like my own, personal reset button – and I think that's true, at least on a subconscious level, for most fans of Schur's work. It's why we keep coming back to these shows. They want the best for humanity, and they truly believe the best is possible.
There's a reason The Good Place has landed with such force, to highlight one example. It's packing a story that straddles the line between "Schur-ian nicecore" sensibilities and the unsexy, often cruel reality of life on our actual Earth. The Good Place is a show that deeply considers the subconscious undercurrents of everyone's basic human decency.
The Trump of it all has helped bring that line-straddling contrast into sharper relief. But Schur would be the first one to tell you that the show itself wasn't conceived as a direct response to the IRL crumbling of civility that the 2016 U.S. election helped accelerate. (The Good Place premiered in Sept. 2016, just a few months before Election Day.)
"This is just how things work, right? All these coincidences pop up, things dovetail," Schur said. "I decided to do a show about ethical and moral philosophy, and then suddenly a guy became president who seemed like he was singlehandedly determined to destroy the very concept of ethics and morality."
For all our moral frailties, these shows assert, people are basically all right.
Sometimes you get a lucky break and that dovetailing happens during the act of creation. Coming out of the hit corporate sitcom The Office, Schur and Parks and Rec co-creator Greg Daniels knew they wanted to tell a story about working in the public sector. But it was also 2008 and the global banking system was facing critical failures.
"The world fell apart and we were acutely aware of the fact that the government was going to ... play a more active role in people's lives, like, at every level," Schur said.
So Parks and Rec came right out of the gate with this aspirational view of government, a premise that basically went "this is what we wish hands-on governance looked like."
Even Schur will admit: it's a notion that hasn't aged particularly well. Looking back on those light-hearted Pawnee escapades now makes him wonder how a show like Parks and Rec will be perceived over time as the hindsight view of what it had to say about the moment it arrived into grows more distant.
"It's funny to think about it now because [society has] gone so far in the opposite direction since that show," he said. "I don't know if that means it'll feel quaint or prescient or what ... because things are seesawing so frequently and so dramatically in terms of the way that people relate to their governments in this country and in the world."
The two shows that followed were both created with a different kind of intentionality. The idea for Nine-Nine started with a story about a kid "who needed to grow up" (Jake Peralta) and a father figure "who had been unjustly kept from the accomplishments he richly deserved" (Raymond Holt). Schur acknowledges the clear layer of social resonance in Holt being drawn as a gay black man, but insists that's not the point. "It was just a story," he said.
The Good Place came from a more abstract source. "[I was] sitting around and wondering what it means to be a good person," Schur said, adding that the show's basic conceit "has no specific relevance to anything that was going on in the world." We all ponder the nature of goodness from time to time, and Schur developed that line of thought out into a journey through the afterlife.
Despite their respectively different creative underpinnings, Schur's three big shows of the 2010s (plus The Office) are often viewed as connected. The "shared universe" theorizing that some fans engage in feels like a product of that; deep down, the shows are all bound together to some extent by their shared thematic sensibilities.
It's not exactly an accident, but that doesn't mean it was done with intent. If you view Schur's overall body of work as a tree and the individual shows as branches, the roots that informed his development as a creator are directly responsible for the common themes we in the audience come to see and talk about.
"There's a David Foster Wallace quote that I think about a lot [where] he says, 'Novels are about what it means to be a fucking human being.' It's a great quote because the curse is very meaningful," Schur said.
"That's what it all boils down to, at some level. What does it mean to be a fucking human being? What are we all doing? What are we trying to achieve? What makes us happy? What makes us sad? Why are we doing the things we're doing? How could we be doing them better? So I don't think it's a coincidence that there's a lot of thematic links to the stuff I've worked on."
But Schur is just as quick to credit his collaborators. Past co-creators/conspirators like Greg Daniels (The Office, Parks and Rec) and Dan Goor (Brooklyn Nine-Nine) were of course instrumental in helping to shape the shows they worked on. But it takes an army to produce a hit TV show, and for Schur that collaborative layer to the process is critical. Even The Good Place, which credits him as the sole creator, wouldn't be what it is without the team that builds it.
"It feels a little disingenuous to keep using the word 'I' because all of these things are collaborative. They're all the result of a lot of very smart and talented and funny people saying what they think is interesting about the world," Schur said. "I am a constant presence, but ... the great majority of the work is being done by other people and they are all bringing different things to the table."
When Schur steps back, he does see The Good Place as a sort of "culmination" of the different ideas and impulses that have shaped him as a creator, though he's quick to credit the entire team for turning his basic idea into the cult sensation that it's become. But as we look back through his work leading up to the latest series, which is now in its final season, Schur admits to seeing a roadmap.
"The Office was a show about how you find joy and happiness in a very dim, fluorescent-lit, sterile environment," he explained. "And where are the little cracks in the pavement where a little flower can poke through." That's not so far off from the underlying point of the U.K. series, he added, but the American version made it more explicit.
If you're interested in writing TV shows that have themes and ideas and morals ... it's going to end up seeming like you [were] writing about the times you lived in."
"Brooklyn Nine-Nine is a show that says there are good people and bad people in the world, and the good people, when they're good, are trying to stop the bad people from being bad," Schur continued, adding that it's "not just cops and robbers" inside that framework. "It's all [about] the teamwork and the determined effort that people make to try to just improve where they can."
Parks and Rec captures some of the same sentiment, but in a different way. Schur described Nine-Nine as "a variation of what had been the main theme of Parks and Rec." He explained: "This job sucks and you don't get any credit and everyone hates you and everyone screams at you. If you work in the government, your job is to just make people's lives a tiny bit better. And there's a real nobility in that."
The Good Place, then, takes all of those ideas and rolls them together into a metaphysical examination of the afterlife. Not just any afterlife, but one shaped by the perspective fed by all of those different-but-thematically-connected ideas. "That's intentional and real," Schur said of the links. "It's the natural flow of where I am, where my brain has gone over the last 15 years, and how I've tried to work out my own thoughts about the world."
Those of us out in the world are luckier for it. In the past decade, Schur has delivered some of the most heartfelt and deeply human stories on television. In a real world environment where it's increasingly hard to feel anything other than despair, he's made us laugh and cry dozens of times over. The stories he's had a hand in creating present an aspirational portrait of humanity; they brim with unbridled hope for our future as a species.
Now, as a new decade approaches, The Good Place creator can't imagine what his beloved shows of the past 10-plus years are going to look like for future audiences. None were created with an eye turned specifically toward social or political commentary but it's clearer now than perhaps ever before that they're all built to last.
"They all ended up having some resonance in some way or another, but I think most of that is just because the country is undergoing such tumultuous change," Schur said. "If you're interested in writing TV shows that have themes and ideas and morals ... it's going to end up seeming like you [were] writing about the times you lived in."
