The Good Place is subverting tropes and depicting interracial relationships the way we’ve always wanted to see them.
While The Good Place focuses on Eleanor’s mostly chaotic journey through the afterlife, it’s also a show that touches on human relationships, including romantic ones. While The Good Place isn’t overtly different from any other show in its approach to romance at first glance, it’s that exact sense of normalcy when dealing with an incredibly diverse cast that makes it so revolutionary.
Related: 8 pop culture impossibilities easier than teaching human ethics to Michael
Eleanor’s first ally in The Good Place was her supposed soulmate, Chidi: an ethics scholar from Senegal who finds himself in many different ethical dilemmas because of Eleanor’s behavior. Next door to them live Tahani and Jason, a British philanthropist and an amateur DJ, who often struggle to understand each other’s very different worldviews.
As in any other show, the situations these characters are put in end up drawing them closer together, and romance is inevitable. But relationships like Chidi and Eleanor’s, or Tahani and Jason’s, are still much too unusual on screen.
While a 2010 census reported that 15% of new American marriages are interracial, it’s still extremely unusual to have a main pairing in a show be between people of different racial or cultural backgrounds. We’re more likely to see interracial couples or mixed-race children in real life than on screen — even in fantasy or science fiction movies and shows.
In the case of The Good Place, it would have been very easy to avoid making Chidi a love interest. The stereotypes associated with his type of character — the scholarly, rather socially awkward thinker — usually estrange the character from any kind of serious romantic association.
Chidi is not portrayed as the ‘the hot one’ of the show (Tahani is), neither is he heroic in the conventional sense, and when you take into consideration the racial bias TV shows tend to have when establishing romantic relationships between characters, it’s a miracle that we got such a beautiful friendship-blossoming-into-something-more between Chidi and Eleanor.
Tahani and Jason’s relationship was easier to spot early on, as they were ‘soulmates’ trying to understand each other, but kept apart for a long time because of Jason’s inability to be himself around her. As their relationship develops into something more, they have to grapple with their differences and move past them. But Jason’s role as comic relief hasn’t stopped him from being at the heart of the story, and through her relationship with him, Tahani is beginning to learn how to be less self-centered.
These relationships feel familiar and real. Even with the insanity that goes on in the Good Place, Eleanor’s neighborhood feels oddly comfortable, and the journey of all the characters toward becoming better people makes the comedy also surprisingly heartfelt.
It’s a realistic depiction of our global society, and the friendships and romances that go on in it. While culture and upbringing are always a factor in the way these characters communicate (or miscommunicate), what race they are or what country they’re from are never barriers between them. Their struggles are just human struggles, which could just as easily have been played out by a cast of actors that were all the same race, or entirely different races.
That doesn’t mean, of course, that the culture of the characters is whitewashed or ignored. We still see Chidi’s life on Earth take place in urban Senegal, and both Tahani and Jason’s pasts are colored somewhat by their cultural experiences, but these are — like in real life — just another part of their personalities, like anyone else’s in the real world.
We don’t know if the relationships between Chidi and Eleanor or Tahani and Jason are endgame, but even if they aren’t, it doesn’t really matter. The fact that The Good Place has done two seasons with such a diverse cast of excellent characters, and managed to include the real diversity of our world in a fantastically weird story, is just another example of what can and should be done with TV shows.
We want to hear your thoughts on this topic!
Write a comment below or submit an article to Hypable.