Hello anyone, everyone, and welcome to the week I review. My name is, uh, Amateur Analytics… Analyst, because today I want to talk about Google Ads – the other side of the equation that more popular folks on this platform use to pay their bills.

Note: This is going to be very specific to my experience using Google Ads as a way to expand the potential reach of my channel. If you’re looking for a comprehensive evaluation, this ain’t it.

Hundreds of hours of video are being uploaded to YouTube every single minute. And even though it is one of the most popular websites in the entire world, it’s oh-so easy to just get buried. And I don’t really like promoting myself all that much. I don’t even post every one – or even most – of these videos on Facebook, because I don’t want to inundate my pretend friends with the nonsense my subscribers at least actively signed up for. I tweet about them, but literally zero people click on the links I post on Twitter, so…

A few months back, I was talking with a colleague about this whole thing. He told me that I should buy fake subscribers to boost numbers and he would find me a service that would do it. I was genuinely offended by the suggestion. On both a practical and a moral level: hell no.

But around the same time, a new button appeared in the YouTube Studio: Promote. I had never really considered the possibility of advertising my videos, but the appearance of this button coincided with an email offering me $100 in ad credit if I spent $50 in real money – which seemed like a pretty good deal.

So I thought, Even though I won’t actively promote my videos, I do think they are worth people’s time, so I’ll buy a few ads and see if I can’t get people to agree. Worst case scenario: I’ll get a video out of it.

I planned to start with my review of the game GRIS, but unfortunately I made a big dumb error there that left me much too embarrassed to promote it. Instead, I went with my breakdown of a few royalty-free music subscription services, which is a pretty good video that took me a helluva lot of time to make.

And if we take a look at that video’s analytics… yep, that’s the start.

This ad was the most expensive I’ve done so far and also the worst in terms of folks actually clicking on it – both things I’ve learned useful lessons from.

On YouTube, there are two types of ads: video (the pre- or mid-roll that you might have seen on this video if I had 5 times the subscribers) or Discovery, which are the highly visible videos that show up in search as an ad.

Because I don’t think these videos in their entirety are conducive to the former – and the joke 5- and 15-second options I made were definitely not as funny in practice as they were in my head – I have gone exclusively with Discovery.

What made that initial video so expensive was a lack of understanding on my part of how the payment system works. There is a bidding system, where you determine how much you are willing to spend on a given action: either cost per view – CPV – or cost per (thousand) impression(s) – CPM. I assume on the other end, folks can do the minimum they’ll accept for an ad to be run against their video.

I have stuck with CPV, because I like the guarantee that it comes with. General awareness of the existence of this channel is less meaningful than someone actually checking it out… but it also fixes the cost. A well-run ad could have a high click rate, ultimately resulting in an overall cheaper ad. Or it could be terrible. Higher risk. Maybe higher reward. Perhaps I’ll try it out sometime.

Ad targeting is kind of fascinating for someone who has absolutely no background in advertising or marketing. The number of options you have to select potential viewers is kind of exhausting, particularly since I don’t know what my target demo actually is. So, I typically ignore that kind of stuff and focus on interests and search keywords, which is even lengthier but at least I feel like I understand. I like to get that click rate as high as possible, which doesn’t matter, per se, with CPV but gives a sense of how well I’ve aimed the ad.

Indeed, that first video had the worst of them all, with a measly 1%. And I know why it happened, because I targeted “music” as an interest, which resulted in a creator-focused video comparing licensing services being placed against, like, music videos. Now I’m more careful, but it is easier with something like my review of the very bad Netflix movie Bird Box. If I target “Movies” as a general interest and tag the keyword “Netflix,” I’m pretty much set.

I actually posted videos and ran ads on Bird Box and Black Mirror: Bandersnatch simultaneously – ya know, in attempt to be on trend. The ads resulted in decent numbers of views even though I went for an CPV of only 2 cents, vs the 6 cents default on the music subscription – 2 cents is now my go-to CPV. But the thing is, as soon as the ads ended, those views flat-lined and have barely moved since. They might be two of the highest-viewed videos on the channel, but not meaningfully.

My discussion of the competing Fyre documentaries, on the other hand, is not too far off in view count, but only 257 came from the ad. The other 1300 came organically. What does that tell me? I dunno. Maybe I shouldn’t have done the Birdbox review three weeks after the fact.

In any case, I have also stopped putting nearly as much money into ads as I did when Google’s credits were doing the heavy lifting. Now that it’s just me footing the bill, I am typically more in the $5-10 range – which is just a little boost in visibility without breaking the bank.

Plus, that little boost can be enough to trigger the psychological component to this whole thing: take the Music Subscription video. It’s not like post-ad viewership has spiked, but it has consistently grown, and I think that the fact that it had passed 1000 views is at least partly responsible. If you’re searching through videos on YouTube for something specific, would you choose the thing with 100 views or 1000? I’m typically going to go with the latter, and the ad was the differential there. So running ads that give myself a new, slightly higher base line, can make the channel seem a bit more popular to the people who care about that kind of thing.

This is, however, fundamentally different from “buying views” on some unscrupulous internet marketplace because I am really just paying for premium placement of my thumbnails. Folks who otherwise might not be subjected to my dumb face will now be forcibly confronted with it. They can then decide of their own volition if it’s the way they want to pass their time. It’s definitely a small, almost insignificant advantage, but the video is also clearly marked as an ad, so it seems like a fair one to me.

I changed some things about the way I start my videos at the beginning of 2019 in direct response to an ad that I ran. It was on the Netflix anime Aggretsuko’s Christmas special. Fewer than half of the viewers made it through the nine seconds of intro. And I’ll admit that it wasn’t my best “clickbait title,” but that was a pretty rough awakening. And so I removed that entire thing, replacing it with testing out my potential thumbnail faces.

And then I went even further by cutting the first second of the opening drum fill. The intro is now four seconds long.

And then I pushed my initial thoughts to the video title, which I think is honestly the bigger deal. Would my Fyre video have gotten the views it did without a clicky name? Not a chance! Would some of my earlier videos have done better if I had been a bit more creative in my naming? I’m sure.

Oh well.

My video on Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom definitely benefitted from its title. I didn’t run an ad on it, and yet it has just this past weekend dethroned the Netflix-hating videos in terms of views, and it has long since destroyed them in terms of Watch Time.

Another metric it has beaten any other video in: subscribers gained. More than 11% of my subscribers have come from folks who, I would assume, liked what I had to say about Salo. Another 10% were from  one of my first four videos, actually, which had started strong but fell off when Moviepass finally left the public consciousness. That Bandersnatch review did alright there, too, which leads to a question: because almost every view on that video was ultimately paid for… does that mean I “bought” those subscribers? If so, how much did they cost?

And here’s where we get into the question of practical value, for me, of running ads.

Views are nice, I guess – we talked about the psychological benefit of that already – but it’s actually kind of depressing on my end, because most people who click the ads don’t stick with the video, resulting in hella low watch time for a video, which also isn’t great algorithmically – and may be part of why my Netflix ads tanked after the fact.

This harsh reality could be offset by a growth in subscribers, hopefully the start of a beautiful viewership, but we’ll have to break out the calculator app on my phone and Excel on my laptop to figure out the average Cost Per Subscription across the ads I’ve run so far to find out.

To start, we need to look at the number of subscribers I received from each of the videos during the time the ad ran. I was actually a little surprised to learn that this comes to only 28 – or about 13% of my total count, and only a few more than Salo has gotten me on its own. So, we’re already starting off pretty low.

I then need to factor in that not every person who saw the video came from an ad, so we determine that percentage – number of views resulting from the ad divided by the total number of views for the duration – and multiply its count by that. Round down and we get 26. Then we divide that by the overall cost of ads thus far – $149 – which equates to… uh,

Five dollars and fifty six cents.

…

Ouch.

Even if you factor in that I got $75 in credit from Google (dunno what happened to the last $25) and so didn’t really pay for half of the ads, that’s still $2.81 for the ones I did buy.

Not a great return on investment, if that was indeed how I was thinking of it.

Particularly considering that taking my colleague up on the offer for some fake subs would have gotten me a whole lot more for a whole lot less. While writing this script, I looked up the going rate for a subscriber these days. Seems to be about 10 cents on the high end, with other options running well below a penny.

Whole lot less than what I’m doing… but oh so much grosser.

Look, my subscriber count is small enough that I get actually excited when I see it tick up. There’s a genuine satisfaction in knowing that someone decided that they wanted to see when, for example, this video was going to come out and took a couple of seconds to press a button saying so. They almost definitely weren’t expecting this video in particular, but… life is more exciting that way! For them and for me.

I get that YouTube is a job for a lot of people and many, many more would like it to be that… and that you need a certain number of subscribers and engagements and etc. in order to get that underway, but cheating one’s way to legitimacy is a bad thing done by bad people who, on a platform built largely on perceived honesty, are proving they don’t deserve success.

So, what have we figured out here? Running ads doesn’t give me a particularly good return, and also is a sometimes frustrating experience – I called technical support due to an issue and was told that there are known problems with view counts in ads and the youtube studio not matching up; and I had to dispute a block placed on the Daniel Sloss video because machines don’t understand context – but I think I’ll keep running them where it feels appropriate to do so.

For example, there is a 100% chance I’m going to run this one as an ad, because I think that’s funny. And in general, there are much worse things I could spend $5ish dollars on. To someone who’s struggling financially, this doesn’t seem to be a great way to really expand your channel… but let’s be honest: the entire foundation of The Week I Review is my ability to burn small amounts of money week after week. So, running largely useless ads fits with my MO.

Also, the genuine confusion in this comment is hilarious and something I want more people to feel.

Six Point One out of Ten

Content Warning: Frank Discussion of Suicidal Ideation

Though I saw it on Broadway and it was all fancy and good, I think the ideal location for a Dear Evan Hansen production is in a high school auditorium. This largely because professional casting agents often seem to misunderstand how critical apparent age is to the performance of a teenage character.

I remember watching the Tony’s a few years back and cringing as fully grown adults sang West Side Story at each other.

Having been in West Side Story as a high school theater kid —
 did you know that Tony is described in the show as a “sandy-haired Polack”? — I felt particularly invested in this travesty. Sure, the actual-Broadway actor was massively more talented than I, but the sheer function of my age meant I embodied the part better than he ever could have. You can accept romantic stupidity in a teenager that you can’t in someone clearly pushing 30.

Case in point: the female lead of Dear Evan Hanson in the original cast was a full decade out of high school, and you can hear it on the OBC; it’s off-putting to hear a matured voice say immature things. The current cast is actually on the young side, which I appreciated. Their voices aren’t as polished, but their youthful idiocy feels more natural. More forgivable.

Oh, and the show’s milquetoast depictions of issues feel like the sort of Very Special Episode production that a high school administration would be all over.

Back in college, an ex-girlfriend started me on what she called Five Things. Each night before going to sleep, we had to verbally state five good things about the day. They could be small but affirming – “I made it through” – or celebratory – “I finally saw Dear Evan Hansen.” That gets pretty easy after you’ve been doing it for a while. Harder is the capper: something good about ourselves.

I thought about this when I was introduced to the show’s namesake: a letter that Evan Hansen’s therapist has tasked him with writing to himself about the day he is set to have, saying that it will be good and things will turn out okay. It’s a hard thing for someone with social anxiety so severe he can’t order food because he would have to interact with a delivery person.

When Evan finally produces something, it’s a bleaker appraisal – that no, the day wasn’t great. The letter is found by Connor Murphy, an outcast with a “school shooter” aesthetic who, due to a wacky misunderstanding, kills himself that night with it in his pocket. His parents then have a wacky misunderstanding of their own, thinking that this letter was a suicide note written to Evan by Connor, and his initial protestations to the contrary fall on deaf ears. So, he goes with it. Hilarity ensues.

There’s a lot to unpack here, because this show is bleak as hell, and it genuinely doesn’t seem to know it.

Despite centering on a mentally ill kid and being spurred on by a suicide, Dear Evan Hansen definitely isn’t about mental illness. Evan’s whole therapy thing is dropped once the story gets underway, and the Connor Murphy that we see for most of the play is… not Connor Murphy. Or even like a phantom version of him. That whole song, Disappear, about how important it is to not let people be forgotten… that “Connor” sings? Where “Connor” says “If you can somehow keep them thinking of me, and make more than an abandoned memory.”

That dude is explicitly – in. the. text. – not Connor. He is Evan’s inner monologue being played by the other actor, while the actual Connor is being erased literally line by line. And yet it’s presented as some meaningful act? What?

Look at the show’s poster. It’s certainly eye catching – iconic, even, but is missing something important. Boom. Fixed it for you. Seriously: Why the actual hell is that cast clean? It spends far more time with Connor’s name on it than it does without, and it’s so fundamental to the show that it’s there. The fact that Connor did sign it, one of the most complicatedly human moments of the entire show, becomes tangible evidence of friendship that the Murphy’s latch onto. But no. He is disappeared.

Related topic: Why’d he do it? Really? Why, exactly, did Connor Murphy commit suicide? Guess no one actually cares, huh? Because no one ever asks that question.

The truth is that Connor is nothing more than an inconvenience. Hell, the point of “Requiem” is that most of his family doesn’t really think he’s worth remembering. But now they are being faced with something different. Zoe doesn’t know how to cope, singing: “After all you put me through; don’t say it wasn’t true; that you were not the monster that I knew.” Connor traumatized her, and now she is faced with the possibility that he actually did care, and maybe he did – his final onstage action could charitably be read that way – but the thing telling her that maybe she *should* play the grieving girl is the real thing that isn’t true.

What are we the audience supposed to take from all that?

What are we to take from You Will Be Found, a wonderful song that is completely meaningless. It’s predicated on two lies: that Connor was Evan’s friend, and that someone came to Evan’s rescue when he fell from the tree. If those two things are not true – and they are not – then what is it saying? Instead, the whole song reads as this incredibly bleak look at the culture of virality.

Disembodied voices start liking and sharing and reposting – random people latching onto this random video of this awkward guy on the internet talking about this person that they had never heard of and do not actually care about. But none of it is real. The video is a lie, and so is their inane ramblings in support of it. Everyone is living in fantasyland. Some more actively or maliciously than others, but each equally fake.

And this could have been an extremely effective commentary in a dark social satire about the lies that we have to tell ourselves to just get through the day, let alone actual tragedies.

But that’s not what Dear Evan Hansen is doing.

What about how the opening number in Act 2 is undermined by its finale, or how the underlying class stuff leads only to the conclusion that, sure, poor parents are bad, but rich parents are… also bad in a different way, sort of?

Dear Evan Hansen wants to have its cake and eat it too – to bring up a lot of capital-I Important issues and put them to catchy-as-hell songs to make you think that it has thematic depth. It doesn’t. Again, this is a show catalyzed by a suicide that treats the dead character and his final action as a prop.

That’s not okay.

I was never quite Connor Murphy.

But.

When I was in high school, I slapped a girl in the face. Not hard. Not even really with intention, but I did it.

The next day, I was called into the vice principal’s office and told I was being suspended. I started punching myself in the head – trying to, I guess, crush my own skull with my fist. If I had had something sharp in my hand, I would probably be dead.

That impulse – to stop living – wasn’t a new one. About a month earlier, I stood at the top of a staircase, weighing the odds that diving down headfirst would actually kill and not just cripple me. It might seem like an accident. That wasn’t the first either. Crying in that office would not be the last.

I sucked in high school. A few more left turns and I could have easily ended up in the same place Connor did.

So I take it fucking personally that he was cast aside like that in a show that is supposed to be about giving every person their due.

I am still here, obviously. Most days, I know that’s a good thing. Some days, I have to actively remind myself. I still do those Five Things every night, though coming up with something good about myself day after day is as hard as ever.

I have tried on multiple occasions and spent thousands of dollars of my own money trying to put together various media projects about suicide, but I have always scrapped them because in the end I realized that they were not helpful – that the message they were actually conveying rather than the one I wanted to convey was more harmful than helpful. And I wasn’t okay with that. Without something worthwhile to say there, it’s really better to say nothing.

What makes all this bizarre is that, in the vacuum of the Original Broadway Cast recording, you wouldn’t know any of this. In the music, it is only clear that Connor is dead and not really why. And so you can listen to it wih just the barest amount of cognitive disoonance, knowing that it is part of a larger, problematic project while belting it out just the same. And I have been ever since curtain call, because I genuinely love the music in Dear Evan Hansen. I like every single song, and I crank up the volume and sing along while doing, well, pretty much anything – much to the chagrin of my neighbors.

If Dear Evan Hansen was nothing but its songs, this would be a cut-and-dried slam dunk success of a concept album. (The Grammy was well deserved.) But it’s not that. It’s an incredibly bleak story that feigns optimism. And it completely fails its characters at every turn.

It didn’t have to be this way. None of it was inevitable. And yet, here it is.

Five Point Zero Out of Ten.

I found Daniel Sloss the same way I imagine most people did: Netflix. The pair of specials – Dark and Jigsaw – that went up there last year were deep and, well, dark; they got at some really interesting truths about society and humanity; love and relationships. I became a fan. And so did the 177 others in the sold-out show I attended last week. And he knows where all that support has come from. Literally the first word out of his mouth was “Netflix” followed by, “It’s life-changing.” Nope. Not going to do an accent. I’m sorry.

The Netflix comedy scene is huge and, I think, one of the biggest draws its sticker price keeps increasing – especially as it’s gone international. From collections of fifteens-to-half half hours to solo hour-plus specials from names big and small alike, there’s not a better service for comedy fans – sorry, HBO. Of course, it’s not always great or even good, but there’s also some genuinely amazing stuff; heck, it’s home to arguably my favorite comedy special of all time, Bo Burnham’s Make Happy, a show I almost went to the taping of but that it’s ultimately good I didn’t for a variety of reasons mostly related to emotional stability.

Arguably the most significant special released last year was Hannah Gadsby’s Nannette, a poignant and timely hour that spawned more mainstream think pieces than any set not done by an admitted sexual harasser who has learned all the wrong lessons, stopped being funny, and really just needs to go away. Fittingly, Nanette was a response to all that. And every event like it.

So is X. Sloss’s latest is kind of like Nanette by way of Anthony Jeselnik – featuring the righteous sincerity of the former with the gleeful viscousness of the latter. But, like Jeselnik himself, I would say that the last few years has moderated Sloss’s punchlines. Offensiveness has never been as core to his comedy as it is to Jeselnik’s – or, really, anyone else’s – but Dark and Jigsaw both are far more antagonistic than this.

Which is to say, the 51.3% of people who disliked my review of Jeselnik’s Fire in the Maternity Ward special will hate X, and so will anyone insecure and-slash-or problematic enough to feel attacked by an ad for a razor company.

X is about being a man in 2019 – both in the literal sense of maleness and also the societal sense of masculinity. It is a complicated, layered performance that gets at some very fundamental truths, not all of which can or should be laughed off.

He refers to his format – used at least in Dark, Jigsaw, and an unnamed show mentioned in X that he explicitly noted Netflix didn’t pick up but sounded pretty darn interesting – 60 to 70 minutes of jokes followed by a 15-minute TED talk. This because at some point he stops searching for punchlines in order to say what he wants to say. It isn’t necessarily that the topics can’t be made funny but that what he wants to convey is better expressed during moments of that “tension” Hannah Gadsby is always talking about – sorry, last time.

What makes X so effective as a cohesive entity is how cleanly it transitions from jokes to non jokes – at least as far as the material is concerned (put a pin in that). You can draw a straight line from the first joke to that conclusion, because it was always building to an inevitable moment where he needs to talk about something that isn’t funny. The seeds were planted right after that Netflix aside, when he introduced everything by saying that we the audience were in for some serious discomfort. I thought at the time that that was going to be about the jokes he would be telling. Turns out… it wasn’t. They are very funny, and I laughed a lot. And there was some shock-for-the-sake-of-shock, but much less than I had expected.

So it was the inevitable turn that was going to make us squirm in our seats; that’s what he was preparing us for. For this ending, when his attention turned squarely onto the only thing one human could do to another that could never under any circumstances ever be justified.

And if you don’t know what that is… you should see this show. And also reassess a lot of things about your life.

If you do, then you’re probably already a little uncomfortable about the prospect of listening to another straight white man talk about rape. And Sloss is well aware of that – pin removed – as he breaks the flow of his storytelling to impress upon us that what is coming is not a joke, he is not joking, and that we need to trust him when he says that. He is not trying to pull a fast one; he is extremely serious.

This is centered around the story of an assault – not his own but one he inadvertently facilitated. It’s horrible. Awful. Infuriating. And only about him insofar as he is the one talking about it in his self-obsessed comedy special… so a fair amount, I guess, but all of this is part of The Point.

It’s interesting to see this show with that Liam Neeson controversy still in the headlines. For those unaware, the actor admitted during an interview with The Independent that many decades ago, he literally walked the streets in a black neighborhood waiting for someone to jump him so that he could then beat that person to death. This to quote-unquote avenge the rape of a close friend of his by a black man. He was mad at a black man and wanted to take it out on all of them in response – ya know, white hoods aren’t a great look.

But I think the thing about this that everyone is ignoring is the thing that’s always ignored: her perspective, whoever she is. Right now, that feels almost appropriate because it was so long ago. But let’s not pretend that if it had somehow become a story at the time we wouldn’t be focusing on him and not the survivor. It wouldn’t have ever been how his friend was dealing with it. Because even though it happened to her, that experience isn’t valued. It becomes about the angry white man who wanted to be the hero. As though that could have ever made it better.

But… do you know how many times I have thought about that? Not the walking through a neighborhood looking for an excuse to enact random killings, but how I would absolutely destroy a person who hurt someone close to me like that? Dozens at bare minimum, with disturbingly detailed plans considering there’s no actual situation to base it all on. It’s absurd. It’s awful. Awful that our society is such that it’s even the kind of thing I might want to mentally prepare for, but also awful that my reaction is not “I Will Be There For That Person” but rather “I Will Literally Cut Out Their Attacker’s Tongue And Watch Them Drown In Their Own Blood” (it’s dark up here).

And it gets to the critical reason why there needs to be a male version of Nanette, because even though Hannah Gadsby is speaking from the survivor’s perspective and that’s the only one we should really be caring about, it’s Daniel Sloss’s telling that triggers the realization that that thing I was just talking about is not good in any scenario. That I am preemptively making something about me that isn’t and never was. I do not, on the whole, relate to Gadsby’s experience. Her life has been full of trauma that I cannot even fathom.

Sloss I can get. He too is a straight white dude in his late 20s raised in a society that puts men at the center of all of these narratives. He has the same external view of all this horror that I do, that I can relate to in a way I can’t really relate to people who have been underneath the horror this whole time.

At the end of 2015, reeling from a genuinely horrible breakup that I had initiated, I wrote a twelve-thousand-word story about my relationships with women – and not just romantic ones. It became a very self-indulgent and masochistic one-man show; the only image of which is right here. It was cathartic – unexpectedly so – for me to sit mostly naked underneath a bright light, having just shaved my head for the first time in my life, and listen to an audio recording I had made of this story for the very first time in a room of other people also hearing it for the very first time – again, weird place to be.

That was me trying to grapple with some of the same questions that are now central to this conversation we’re all having. Men, on the whole, aren’t great at expressing their emotions. So we tend to do it in weird, showy ways if we do it at all. For me, that could be movies or one man shows or strange asides here on this channel – not always the most relatable methods of expression but maybe someone still gets something from it.

For many more, though, it’s comedy. Certainly that’s the case for Daniel Sloss. Too many men have actively misunderstood Me Too and Times Up and made it about them. Here is a guy who gets them both and is trying to wrestle with how to not make it about him in the context of a show written and performed by him. And that’s important to see. Because his onstage self-sparring is the catalyst for internal reflections about the same conversations we’ve had with ourselves. What have we done; what could we have done; what can we still do.

X should be required viewing for all men. But really, it should be required viewing for all boys – and not just for those final minutes. This whole show is about righting the wrongs of a 15-year-old’s perspective, one put in place by a society that just didn’t care about anyone else’s… and probably still doesn’t.

It is powerful. It is timely. And Netflix better fucking buy it.

Nine-Point-Zero out of Ten.

I grew up going to a Unitarian Universalist church in Rhode Island. I now go to one (on and off) in New York City; it was actually in that church that I decided to start this YouTube channel. Like many UUs, I do not believe in God or an afterlife. It is a religion without a creed – just seven core principles.

The Good Place feels pretty UU to me. In it, no earthly religion was “right” – and all of them were wrong. There is no “God” deity watching over benevolently or maliciously. To the extent that any eternal beings are watching, it is with detached amusement. Some of them enjoy humanity’s TV shows, but humans? Meh.

In The Good Place, a person is judged by math, clinically objective arbiter that people feel it to be. Every action they take over the course of their lives is given a numerical value by impartial accountants in a neutral zone. Hold the door for someone and get a few points. Write a mean comment on this video and lose a lot of them. After a person dies, that sum total must reach a certain threshold. If it does, they go to The Good Place. If not, off to the Bad Place.

(Now, the rules as presented in Season One are not quite the same as they are in Season Three, and late revelations make the presence of Mindy St Clair’s Medium Place seem to break the show’s internal logic, but rules change as shows evolves and ultimately the changes here were for the better, so whatever… Had I not binged the entire thing over the course of four days last week, I likely wouldn’t have even considered that.)

Critically, these counts are weighted by intent.

My girlfriend, who was raised Catholic, told me about a sermon her pastor once gave concerning good deeds wherein he mentioned atheists. Specifically, the fact that atheists have a purity of intent that no one who believes in an afterlife can have. If an irreligious person does something good, it must be because they feel compelled to do good, not because they’re concerned about eternal damnation.

This is, of course, an oversimplification and not really correct; Tahani raised billions of dollars for charity but not because she cared about the causes so much as the fact that she could raise a lot of money for charity. Her religious beliefs or lack thereof (no one in The Good Place has a religion) play no part in the selfishness of her motivations.

But the pastor’s broader point is something I have spent a fair amount of time thinking about. For example, when I hear the disconcerting admission that people believe atheists are incapable of morality, which says so much more about that person’s fundamental values than it does about mine. Because I do consider myself a generally moral and ethical person – at least, I try to be. And that trying is not driven by what happens after I die but by a fervent belief that not being awful will make the time we do all have generally more pleasant. But, of course, trying to figure out what that even means can be exhausting and I’m frequently unsuccessful. We’ll get to that.

Within a few years, college seminars will teach The Good Place. But not as, like, a one-off class in larger study of primary sources – no, its take on the philosophy of ethics and morality will be the focus of the curriculum. A bunch of 18 to 22 year olds will sit around a table with the coolest professor in school and not just discuss Kierkegaard and Kant and Hume and etc. but the way their philosophies function in the show.

It is perfectly suited to this, as each season has seen the scope of its ethical explorations expand. First, it is narrowly focused on four individuals; then it looks at how a group forms individuals, using those same four and their captor-turned-compatriot as the case in point; and now it’s blown the whole thing wide open, as it attempts to reckon with society as a whole – particularly in 20-ex-teen. Presumably the next season will take that baton and run with it. And I can imagine a few places where it could go from there. This sort of layered approach is perfect for pedagogy.

To be honest, just watching The Good Place at all feels like it should get you a certification from ClemsonX (a Clemson professor vets the show).

While season one gives some fundamentals and cute ways to incorporate moral thinking into your life, it’s season 2 that really gets into it by offering more realistic, practical discussions. I particularly enjoyed Chidi’s forced attempts to solve the ethical conundrum that is the Trolley Problem, brought to “life” with all the gore that a broadcast comedy can provide. This lays the groundwork for a more invigorating discussion later in the semester – one that those dumb 18- to 22-year-olds can bring to their dumb college parties while holding hands and drinking boxed wine. Or whatever.

Season 3, particularly in its final episodes, is The Good Place at its most optimistic and metatextually pessimistic. The revelation that the accounting system considers not just direct intent but also the unintended repercussions of, say, the decision to buy some flowers for your grandmother completely upends everything, destroying any hope anyone could have of being good. This is a dark timeline indeed, but the show rejects that conclusion, leading into what will surely be a fascinating fourth season; but it also speaks to a larger real-world concern for anyone who would really like to be ethical.

When the judge goes down to earth and sees how impossible it is to know if the profits from a tomato are actually funding dictatorships while the system continues to knock them for doing just that, her feelings change. The bar lowers, because it has to. They all see this as an opportunity to change the way their society values (in a literal sense) goodness to one that more closely aligns with, I would think, the way most actual humans do.

They believe that in a vacuum – represented metaphorically by a deliberately constructed afterlife – even not-so-good people have the ability to be good. That the reason people are not so good is because life is bad, and taking life away and adding a basic curriculum on morality and ethics to the proceedings will result in a better class of people.

But where does this stop? Because, taken at face value, this bar lowering makes the case that taking steps to mitigate one’s adverse side effects has no real value. And I don’t think that’s right. But, of course, nothing is simple.

When Chidi is given the initial revelation that he is in the bad place, he leaps to the very wrong conclusion that it is a result of his decision to ingest almonds despite their environmental impact. Because a single almond takes a heckuva lot of water to produce… though so do most other foods. And, if you were to compare almondmilk, to, say, dairy milk? No comparison, and you have all of the other environmental impacts beyond just water use that come from dairy farming.

Of course, dairy has far more nutritional benefit than almondmilk. Soy milk comes closer, but none of the altmilks can match it. These are all side effects, unintended consequences of individual decisions. The math will inevitably fail us.

Which is where the philosophy comes in. Because these questions being complicated doesn’t mean they should just be ignored. In the past few years, I have radically changed certain things about how I shop and eat and etc. in order to reduce various negative impacts of my lifestyle on, like, the environment or whatever. But it’s also true that I am not, for example, vegan. Or even vegetarian – though I guess I’m closer than not at this point. Does knowing that factory farming is genuinely horrific while still eating meat with every meal mean someone is bad? Probably. Does me knowing that but still having it periodically mean I am? Sure. Chickens suffer far more than cows but have much less environmental impact. How do you weigh those against each other? Trick question: we should probably all be vegan.

But then there’s the rub that no single person’s decisions mean a damn thing. My decision to eat and/or shop differently doesn’t affect anyone’s anything – it just makes me feel like I’m a better person than people who don’t do those things, despite the fact that what I do inevitably has myriad problems of its own – non-GMO food is bad as heck for the environment and we need to stop lionizing it based on junk science by making any snack food that’s low in sugar also high in pretension.

Everything becomes about trade-offs. But no two people will see the trade in the same way. And Season 3’s brief digression seeing the life of the only man who ever figured out how he would be judged and adjusted his behavior to match shows an awful and miserable life that is *still not enough.*

Look, if there were a Good Place, then 80something years of general unhappiness caused by as purely moral a life as possible is probably worth it for an eternity of bliss. But when there isn’t a Good Place or any other Place and this is all we’ve got, how much sacrifice is it even fair to ask someone to make? And fairness is as fundamental a philosophical problem as we’ve got, now mixed with the literal worth of a pleasant life against all the bad things that must exist in order to make that life possible.

And to follow that nightmarish spiral results in nothing less than you staring at two hats for 80 minutes trying to understand the moral repercussions of a wrong selection. And that’s why everyone hates philosophy professors.

Ha ha. Show references. This is a review.

I spent a lot of the nearly 900 minutes of The Good Place laughing. A whole lot of them just sort of feeling, with the last few straight-up crying. But in all of that, I was thinking. I was thinking about my own morals and ethics, about the life I have lived and the plan I have for keeping that whole thing going. And when the credits rolled on season three, I didn’t stop thinking. And that’s the sign of something truly special, that this unassuming fantasy comedy on NBC has pushed me wrestle with these fundamental questions. I’m not sure what answers I’m going to find on the other end, but I’m grateful for the show that got the gears turning.

Nine-Point-One out of Ten