‘The Good Place’ turned into a perfect show to binge by accident

The Office is more popular than ever. Just ask writer/producer Mike Schur, who also appeared on the show numerous times as Dwight Schrute’s cousin Mose.

“I’m literally getting recognized for playing Mose on The Office more now than I was when I was playing Mose on The Office 15 years ago. It’s really wild,” Schur said in a 2019 interview looking back over the past decade. 

“There’s an entirely new generation of people out there who are watching The Office,” he continued. “Every 11-year-old kid I know is watching [it], including my own son, who just binged the entire nine seasons. And they don’t know that it predates their existence on Earth.”

The context for all of this was a discussion about streaming, and how its development has been shaped in part by the kind of TV that Schur is known for. Chances are you have at least one of the shows he’s connected to on your list of rerun go-tos: Parks and Rec, Brooklyn Nine-Nine, and The Good Place.

We’ve talked about the idea of comfort TV here on Mashable, and how it functions as a sort of coping mechanism. In our chat, Schur referred to this modern phenomenon of old shows finding new success as the “library revolution.” Most of you are probably tuned into this, even if it’s on a subconscious level: Popular TV doesn’t disappear the way it used to once it goes off the air.

Schur talked about how the recent death of The Mary Tyler Moore Show star Valerie Harper left him feeling blue and in the mood to see Harper again in the role of Rhoda Morganstern. So he did what most of us would do: He turned to the internet.

“There’s an entirely new generation of people out there who are watching The Office.”

“I was like, I wonder if I can watch some old Mary Tyler Moore Show [episodes]. You can, they’re all on Hulu, every single one of them. At the click of a button you can watch Mary Tyler Moore. And that just is so different from when I was growing up, in a good way,” he said.

What Schur called the library revolution is of course only part of what’s happening right now. There’s also a rich assortment of new things to watch arriving on a regular (and sometimes overwhelming) basis. With The Good Place’s end and Brooklyn Nine-Nine entering its seventh season, fans of Schur’s work are starting to wonder what’s next. He’s definitely aware of the opportunities that are out there. This is a good time to be a TV creator, he said, even if the current streaming boom makes the future harder to predict than ever.

“I mean, Jeffrey Katzenberg and Meg Whitman are about to launch this Quibi thing where they’re going to make [short-form] episodes of stuff,” he said. “I don’t know if that’ll last for a long time. It could disappear in a year or it could be the new way that everybody consumes content for the next 100 years.”

The same could even be said for an apparent titan like Netflix. “If you told me that Netflix was going to be the only way that…anyone can watch content 10 years from now, I would believe you. And if you told me that Netflix was going to go out of business in three days, I would also believe you. No one has any idea what the future holds for any of these services.”

It’s the macro view that matters here, the idea that content creators working in what has traditionally been the TV space now have all of these other options. The uncertainty is still there – “It feels like a bubble, but it’s been a while and it hasn’t burst yet,” Schur said with a chuckle – but that doesn’t diminish the opportunities that are available in the here and now.

I still wonder about streaming, though. The medium has inherently different capabilities, as Netflix has proven (and others have followed) with the so-called “binge” model. Even looking at Schur’s work, from The Office to Parks and Rec to Brooklyn Nine-Nine and finally The Good Place, you can see a sort of progression in how those stories are told.

Image: Colleen Hayes / NBC

So I mentioned that, to me, The Good Place feels like Schur’s most made-for-streaming work yet, in the sense that each episode is fully committed to unfurling an ongoing story. That makes it a more difficult show than the others to just jump into as a newcomer if you haven’t been following along the whole time. 

“The ironic thing is that The Good Place was designed as a way to do an old timey, heavily serialized cliffhanger show that drove live viewership,” Schur said. The last show he watched that hooked him in such a way was Lost. And while The Good Place is vastly different in its tone and execution, any fan will readily tell you it does do a similar kind of thing.

“I wanted every episode to end with a sort of ‘Oh my god, what’s going to happen next?’ feeling, to try to create that sort of water cooler [moment]. And ironically, I ended up creating a perfect binge show…for people who like to watch things on Netflix.”

Schur explained how he’s come to see this idea of chasing a certain type of audience or viewing habit as a wasted effort. “I tried to do one thing and ended up doing the opposite,” he said. “It appears to be a sort of fool’s errand to try to predict how any of this stuff is going to affect people and how it will change how they watch.”

So in the end, the answer to the question of how the explosion of streaming influences Schur creatively is: It doesn’t. He’ll continue to work on making things that hopefully all of us end up loving – there’s enough of a track record for fans to have faith in that – but don’t expect it to hinge on the way we consume content on one platform versus another.