The Good Place, that show your one friend keeps telling you to watch because it's really great (you should listen to them about that), is back for its third season of moral quandaries, food puns and forking good jokes. It's been a while since we checked in on Eleanor, Michael, Chidi, Janet and the rest of the gang, so we're here to help.
Here's what you need to remember about The Good Place, one of TV's smartest shows—ever, and a little scoop from Janet herself, D'Arcy Carden.
The twist.
Season one ended with the big reveal: Eleanor (Kristen Bell), Chidi (William Jackson Harper), Jason (Manny Jacinto) and Tahani (Jameela Jamil) weren't in heaven, they were in hell. It was all an experiment by Michael (Ted Danson).
The twist again.
Season two featured Michael, a demon, try to cover up his experiment's failure. The dead humans eventually started working with Michael on ethics and morals, working to make him understand humanity. This was all the while they worked on bettering themselves. Together, they escaped Michael's Bad Place version of The Good Place and attempted to get to the actual Good Place. But it's never that easy.
They're alive, damn it!
During their quest to get to The Good Place, Michael, Janet, Eleanor, Chidi, Jason and Tahani encountered the all-knowing judge, Gen (Maya Rudolph). She couldn't let them just go to The Good Place, so a plan was hatched—the humans would go back to being alive on Earth to prove they could change into good people. Will they find each other? Can they learn how to be better? These are the questions.
"For the first two years, all of the sort of philosophy and ethical stuff was sort of theoretical because a lot of it was like, ‘Well, this is how people should behave on Earth, but we're not on Earth, so, sort of too late,'" series creator Mike Schur previously told E! News.
So now that they're on Earth, the real test begins.
"Let's see if they can get better and think about their actions and how they affect other people and stuff like that," Schur said. "Part of it is we thought of it as a little bit like, ‘where the rubber meets the road,' where it's been a little bit theoretical—all of the discussions of philosophy have been a little bit theoretical because it's been after they died, and now it's not. Now they're just milling around on Earth. So, the idea is to see what happens to people who are actually alive on Earth when they start contemplating these questions that we're asking."
And now?
How do otherworldly beings Janet and Michael factor in? You'll have to tune in, Carden told us. "I definitely was worried that Michael and Janet would be in that room for the entirety of season three. Luckily, we are not," Carden said, referencing the area Michael and Janet were in during the second season finale.
"Where we go, I can't really reveal, but I will say it's such a fun, exciting adventure of a season. It's really, really fun," she said.
Season three is already shot and in the can.
"I can tease that I keep getting updates from Mike Schur that it's really good, which is so exciting. It's like a secret even for us…He's very excited, which is always a good sign. It's a such a fun season. The cast, we would do a read through, like a table read, and then we would sort of huddle up afterwards and we'd be like, ‘How is this even better than what we've done before?'" Carden said. "The writers are just—they are beyond, they are the best."
The Good Place one-hour season three premiere airs Thursday, Sept. 27 at 8 p.m. on NBC.
(E! and NBC are both part of the NBCUniversal family.)