The Good Place

Premise and synopsis

Cast and characters

Main

• Kristen Bell as Eleanor Shellstrop, a deceased American woman from Phoenix, Arizona, who seemingly winds up in the Good Place due to being mistaken for an unrelated homonymous lawyer who exonerated innocent clients facing death sentences; in truth, this Eleanor was a selfish, rude pharmaceutical saleswoman who cared only about herself. In order to actually earn her spot, she recruits Chidi to teach her the fundamentals of becoming a better person, all while hiding her true identity from Michael and the other inhabitants.
• William Jackson Harper as Chidi Anagonye, a deceased French-speaking Nigerian-Senegalese professor of ethics and moral philosophy who taught at universities in France and Australia. Although he is kind, supportive and highly-qualified, his inability to make choices frequently leaves him overthinking, overanxious and indecisive, often resulting in poor decision-making. Assigned as Eleanor's soulmate in Michael's Good Place, he gives her ethics lessons in an attempt to make her a better person.
• Jameela Jamil as Tahani Al-Jamil, a deceased wealthy British Pakistani philanthropist and fashion model who forms an unlikely friendship with Eleanor, who initially dislikes Tahani's positive attitude, tendency to name-drop, and perceived condescension; Tahani hides deeply buried insecurities from the way her family treated her.
• D'Arcy Carden as Janet, a programmed guide and knowledge bank who acts as the Good Place's main source of information and can provide its residents with whatever they desire. She is described as a foundational mainframe for all neighborhoods across the Good and Bad Places. Later, Janet gains a more humanlike disposition and begins to act differently from the way she was designed.
• * Carden also portrays multiple Janet iterations throughout the series. Among them are "Bad Janet", a Bad Place counterpart specifically designed by the demons to respond to residents in an inappropriate and impolite manner; "Neutral Janet", an impartial, robotic version of Janet that works in the Accountant's Office; "Disco Janet" who is "fun, but a lot" and, in "Janet", Janet-versions of Eleanor, Chidi, Tahani, and Jason.
• Manny Jacinto as Jason Mendoza, a deceased Filipino American amateur disc jockey and drug dealer from Jacksonville, Florida. He is introduced as Jianyu Li, a Taiwanese Buddhist monk who took a vow of silence; however, he, like Eleanor, was seemingly brought to the Good Place by mistake, and join in her efforts to become better people. Jason has a child-like personality, kindhearted and positive, but also immature, clueless and impulsive.
• Ted Danson as Michael, a being from the afterlife who is the "architect" who runs the Good Place neighborhood in which Eleanor, Chidi, Tahani, and Jason reside. Michael has a fascination with the mundane aspects of human life, like playing with paper clips or searching for one's car keys. Introduced as an angel, he is revealed in the first-season finale to be a demon who tortured Eleanor, Chidi, Tahani and Jason all along in a Bad Place masquerading as a Good Place. In late seasons, he finds himself allying and then genuinely befriending them. "Michael" is a Hebrew name meaning "who is like God". The character of Michael was based on the archangel Michael.

  Recurring

Demons

• Tiya Sircar as Vicky, a Bad Place demon who portrays the "real Eleanor Shellstrop", whose position in the Good Place Eleanor supposedly stole in the first season. In the second season, when Michael's plans repeatedly fail, she tries to blackmail Michael into giving her control over the neighborhood. Late in the series, Michael places her in charge of introducing the other demons to the revised afterlife system.
• Adam Scott as Trevor, a cruel Bad Place demon who bullies the main group. He makes a return in the third season posing as an overenthusiastic member of Chidi's academic study on Earth, only to be later exiled by the Judge upon being discovered.
• Marc Evan Jackson as Shawn, Michael's wicked boss and ruler of the Bad Place, who is first presumed to be the Judge, an impartial godlike being who decides on matters of the universe. Shawn gives Michael two chances to pull off the torture experiment and later turns against him when he finds out about Michael's betrayal. He is also the main character of the spin-off web series The Selection.
• Luke Guldan as Chris Baker, a muscular Bad Place demon. After initially struggling to play Eleanor's gym rat soulmate in Michael's second neighborhood, he eventually adopts much of this persona into his actual personality. Chris is a minor antagonist on multiple occasions.
• Bambadjan Bamba as Bambadjan, a Bad Place demon pretending to be a lawyer in the Good Place. He is among the more cunning of Shawn's demons.
• Josh Siegal as Glenn, a Bad Place demon pretending to be a cheerfully dopey Good Place resident. He is among the few demons to show actual concern for another being. He blows up in "Tinker, Tailor, Demon, Spy", but reconstitutes himself with time.

  Humans

• Maribeth Monroe as Mindy St. Claire, a deceased corporate lawyer and addict who died in the process of founding a charity she had planned during a cocaine high. The charity generated enough good points after her death that her point total exceeded that required to enter the Good Place. As a compromise, the Judge ruled that she would receive her own private Medium Place, where everything is mediocre and grounded in the 1980s.
• Kirby Howell-Baptiste as Simone Garnett, an Australian neuroscientist and, briefly, Chidi's girlfriend. She is also the second test subject to be sent to the experimental Good Place, but initially believes that the entire neighborhood is a hallucination generated by her brain at the moment of death.
• Eugene Cordero as Steven "Pillboi" Peleaz, Jason's best friend and partner in crime. Jason, Tahani and Michael manage to convince him to avoid criminal behavior and focus on his career in elder care so that he could get into the Good Place.
• Mitch Narito as Donkey Doug, Jason's dopey father and other partner in crime. Doug treats Jason as more of a "homie" than a son, and their familial relation is not revealed until the third season. Doug is Jason's first choice to reform into deserving the Good Place, but he proves too set in his ways.
• Rebecca Hazlewood as Kamilah Al-Jamil, Tahani's exceedingly successful and competitive younger sister. Tahani died attempting to humiliate her and often struggles with feelings of inferiority compared to her.
• Ajay Mehta and Anna Khaja as Waqas and Manisha Al-Jamil, Tahani's verbally abusive parents, who are the true cause behind her and Kamilah's relationship.
• Leslie Grossman as Donna Shellstrop, Eleanor's cruel, self-centered, negligent mother. In the third season, it is revealed that she faked her death in Arizona and reformed herself as a PTA mom in a Nevada suburb.
• Keston John as Uzo, Chidi's best friend. He had long suffered from Chidi's indecisiveness and witnessed Chidi's original death.
• Brandon Scott Jones as John Wheaton, the first test subject sent to the experimental Good Place. In life, he was a gossip columnist and published inflammatory articles, especially about Tahani.
• Ben Koldyke as Brent Norwalk, a bigoted and arrogant corporate chief executive, and the fourth test subject sent to the experimental Good Place. He proves to be a significant wrench in Eleanor and Michael's plans, as Michael's old methods do not work on him as they did on Eleanor.
• Michael McKean and Noah Garfinkel as Doug Forcett, a Canadian who once took psychedelics and coincidentally guessed the workings of the afterlife to a far higher degree of precision than any known religion or prophet. Michael keeps a picture of Forcett on his office wall, which is seen in many episodes. In a later episode, Michael McKean portrays an much older, neurotic Forcett who lives a torturously frugal and self-sacrificial life to avoid the Bad Place. Garfinkel is later briefly seen in a sequence as a younger Forcett.