In terms of characters, The Good Place had it all: actors at the top of their game, lines that made you spit out your drink laughing, and storylines that were as compassionate and thought-provoking as they were funny. With such an amazing cast, it’s hard to pick the best characters in The Good Place, but here we go anyway!
Created by Michael Schur and running for 4 seasons from 2016 to 2020, The Good Place tells the story of Eleanor Shellstrop, a woman who finds herself in the Good Place after having lived a morally reprehensible life. Eleanor immediately realizes that she’s been sent there by mistake, though, and tries to learn to be good in order to keep her spot.
15. Simone
Simone, Chidi’s colleague and love interest at the university where he teaches, starts off as just a friendly supporting character. However, when she ends up in the experimental Good Place that Michael runs (to prove that people can change for the better after death), she decides that she’s still in the midst of dying, and the entire reality around her is just a hallucination created by her sputtering neurons. She decides to roll with it because the froyo she thinks she’s conjuring up is really good.
She’s a pretty good character, unfortunately, she does has very tough competition.
14. Mindy
Mindy St. Claire is the sole resident of the Medium Place, a bland little suburban house in between the Bad and Good Places. Mindy lived a life of debauchery until a sudden outpouring of goodwill toward her fellow humans (she had done a lot of drugs), during which she prepared to donate her life savings to charity and then immediately died by falling on the subway tracks. Mindy is a creeper and mostly terrible, but she does let our gang crash many, many times during their reboots, and seeing as everyone has been sent to the Bad Place for hundreds of years, her spot in the Medium Place means that she’s literally the best person to have existed in centuries. Ooof.
13. Tahani’s Parents
Tahani’s parents snagged a place on this list by virtue of being some of the worst people who ever existed. They pit their two daughters against each other in absolutely ridiculous pissing contests, including one where they have each child paint their favorite moment from French military history. The winning painting will be displayed at a party, while the loser’s painting will be burned in the fireplace at that same party. These two would fit right in with the Bad Place architects. And yet, how do you not cry when they finally realize it and hug their daughters? All the tears.
12. Trevor
Trevor, another demon who initially helps Michael with his experimental torture design, is the worst sleaze bag you could ever possibly meet. He manages to hit almost every sexist trope in his dealings with Eleanor, and the jokes land every time.
11. Derek
Played by Jason Mantzoukas, Derek starts out as a replacement boyfriend for Janet after she gets jealous of Jason and Tahani’s relationship. When she and Derek turn out to be incompatible, though, she reabsorbs the essence she used to create him and sticks him in her void before giving him to Mindy St. Clair as a sex bot. Mindy ends up rebooting him several hundred million times, until he becomes a classy gentleman who drinks a martini that’s mostly olives, and eventually the most perfect being in existence. Mantzoukas could scream wordlessly into a microphone for an hour and it’d still be funnier than most other comedies.
10. Kamilah
Kamilah is Tahani’s more successful sister, and wow, did the series gild the lily on this one. Kamilah isn’t just one of the most successful visual artists of her time. She’s also a literal rockstar, an Olympic gold medalist, a BAFTA-winning filmmaker, and more. In short, Kamilah is the sister who actually managed to earn her perfectionist parents’ respect, and she’s everything Tahani wishes she herself could be. Despite Kamilah’s apparent callousness, though, when Tahani reaches out to her and calls their parents wankers, Kamilah finally lets her guard down. It’s heartwarming to see the two of them enjoying the afterlife together.
9. Vicky
When we first meet Vicky, she’s a traumatized Eleanor Shellstrop who lived the best, most generous life possible and accidentally got sent to Hell while the other Eleanor got her place in Heaven. Except, SIKE, she’s actually a demon with a short temper and a heart of ice! If Vicky had a spinoff where she just sniped at underlings all day, I would watch it.
8. Judge Gen
The ultimate judge of the entire universe, the one who decides all of our eternal fates, is a personable gal who loves burritos. Also, she’s Maya Rudolph. Need I say more?
7. Shawn
It’s always a pleasure to watch Shawn’s deadpan delivery of all the ways he wants human beings to suffer horribly. I always suspected the Devil would be a sour-tempered nebbish who loves bureaucracy. And I was right.
6. Michael
The twist at the end of season one comes out of left field—that laugh when Eleanor realizes it’s the bad place, come on!—and Michael’s scheme to design a Hell where the damned torture each other is pure genius. But a mind capable of such a devious plot can’t be confined to designing new ways to make mortals miserable, and Michael eventually breaks out of his demonic mold to learn how to be good and then try his hand at a mortal life. How do you not love Michael? Don’t answer. It’s impossible.
5. Janet
What’s not to adore about Janet? As the cheerful AI serving the denizens of the Good Place—and the correspondingly shitty AI grudgingly helping out in the Bad Place—Janet is both hilarious and fascinating. It’s so satisfying to see her gradually transcend her programming to the point where she can have a genuine, heartfelt romance with Jason.
4. Tahani
Tahani starts off as a stereotypical annoying rich person, name-dropping celebrities and showing off her grotesque wealth. She’s heavily involved in philanthropy, but only so that she can prove to her parents that she’s just as good as Kamilah. However, as Tahani learns how to be truly good and then enjoys the afterlife, she’s able to reconcile with her family, explore all the forms of creativity that she never considered trying in her earthly life as a socialite, and even becomes an architect so she can help souls enter the Good Place. Underneath all the jealousy and name-dropping, Tahani is a warm and caring person. Hey! She even gives the lesser (fourth) Hemsworth brother a chance romantically! So kind.
3. Chidi
When you think about it, Chidi’s most damnable offense—the crime that plays the biggest part in sending him to the Bad Place—isn’t really his fault. Chidi suffers from such severe anxiety that any kind of decision paralyzes him, often with debilitating physical symptoms. No wonder every human being on Earth is getting sent to the Bad Place, if indecision is enough to get you tortured for eternity! Once you spend two minutes with Chidi, you can tell he’s good at heart.
Chidi’s passion for ethics is what drives the plot of the series. From Eleanor’s request to teach her how to be good to his star-studded study group in the Good Place, Chidi serves as the audience’s guide to ethics throughout the series. And in a show that’s all about the question of what it means to be good, Chidi executes that duty flawlessly.
2. Eleanor
Eleanor starts off as a callous dirtbag from Arizona, and then ends up running Heaven. Not bad! Eleanor is living (and dying) proof that your circumstances play a huge role in shaping who you are: as she learns, grows, and starts to examine her past, she realizes that the cards were stacked against her when she was born to an alcoholic mother and forced to emancipate from her parents at age 14. It’s hard to be good when you’re carrying around that kind of pain, and throughout her countless Bearimies bouncing around various afterlives, Eleanor is able to transcend her past and reach a quiet enlightenment.
1. Jason
Out of all the weird and lovable characters in The Good Place, Jason could always be counted on to light up the screen. An amateur DJ and member of a 60-person dance troupe, Jason tells the others at one point that his doctor said his brain was “as smooth as an egg.” Jason is yet another character who starts off with an unfair advantage in life. Whether he has a diagnosable neurological condition or is just neurodivergent, Jason turns to a life of crime because that’s how he knows how to survive. But Jason is also an incredibly sweet and earnest guy, and his bottomless goofiness—expertly rendered by Manny Jacinto—always gets a laugh.
The best thing about Jason, though, is how satisfying his story arc is in the end. After Jason decides to walk through the Last Door and end his existence, he makes Janet a necklace to remember him by. He then loses it but finds it after Janet leaves him at the Door. Jason then does something remarkable: he spends a thousand Bearimies meditating quietly in the forest, waiting for her to come back. In classic Jason fashion, though, Janet’s comment that he’s finally become the monk he was pretending to be at the beginning of the series goes right over his head. Jason is the funniest, kindest, most profound character in The Good Place, and that’s why he ranks #1.
Disagree with this ranking? Think I should be sent to the Bad Place for my choices? Well, how would YOU rank The Good Place‘s characters? Let us know in the comments!
(featured image: Fremulon)
