SDCC 2019: 'The Good Place' star Kristen Bell speaks about show's final season and the 'incredible life lesson' she learned [Exclusive]
‘The Good Place’ gave fans of the show a really bad case of the feels with a highly emotional panel at San Diego Comic-Con 2019 that highlighted the fact that the NBC series will be ending after its upcoming fourth season and teased that the final season would feature a new Janet."
MEA World Wide caught up with the cast and crew of ‘The Good Place’ at SDCC 2019. Talking about the show wrapping up after Season 4, executive producer Drew Goddard said the idea of ending the series first came up during the second season.
“I believe Mike (Michael Shur) brought it up to me in Season 2,” he said. “He sort of started figuring out that’s what it was and I tried to talk him out of that really quickly and then as he explained the story that he had in his mind I went ‘oh it is the right decision’.”
“I think when people see the finale they will understand why the show needed to end right now,” Goddard added.
Jameela Jamil, who plays Tahani on the show, said that the final season has “a lot of lines” and will give fans “an unbelievable story”.
“If you thought every other season moved fast, episode to episode, you’re not going to know what hit you,” said Jamil. “We package a lot in because everyone knew beforehand, which is very rare that a team knows that their season is going to finish before it’s even written so the writers kind of took all their ideas and just packed it in with all of the love in the world to this show.”
Speaking about closing off individual character arcs, Kristen Bell, who stars in the series as Eleanor Shellstrop, suggested that the show has some important life lessons about self-improvement and “tough love”.
“What I’ve loved about Eleanor is that she started out feeling like everyone was against her,” Bell said. “Something had happened to her, life had been unjust -- and it had, but it was as if inside her body she was captured in this really tight net, like a dolphin in a net, and then, throughout the four years she knew these people that made her grow and challenged her, she realized she had a pair of scissors in her pocket the whole time and then she wasn’t waiting for someone to cut her out of the net, she had all the answers, and it’s not a key to a cage she can open; it's a series of tiny snips and that is how your heart stops hurting and your soul feels better and you feel confident about who you are and by the end of this show, where we are now, I like that Eleanor likes herself."
"I like that Eleanor started out hating everybody else, held a mirror up and said ‘oh maybe I can be the one to change. Maybe I’m the common denominator,'" she added. "That to me is an incredible life lesson that I would teach my kids.”
The final season of ‘The Good Place’ will begin on September 26, 2019.