Finding the Sweet Spot: The Good Place as a Site of Intergenerational Television Fun

• In Event: Pop Goes the Culture: Reimagining Childhoods in Digital Spaces

Abstract

Amid a pandemic, protests (on masking and mattering), and presidential campaigns, adults and children are wading through a chaotic political and social milieu. While these conversations have been seemingly restricted to the domain of adults, children and adolescents have been processing and exercising their part in this great American reckoning (Lorenz & Rosman, 2020), as evidenced by their discussions of popular culture moments. Cultural theorists and scholars of critical childhood have identified children as capable of engaging with and taking critical stances on notions of power, equity, and ethics (Giroux & Simon, 1989; Kenway & Bullen, 2008). Thus, particular questions arise: when do these discussions of power and equity cross-pollinate intergenerationally? What spaces, times, and platforms are offered for children and adults to listen to each other organically and co-construct meanings concerning these moments? To supply such a space, this paper centers The Good Place a weeknight sitcom lauded as a commercial and critical darling for its original premise and captivating character and plot development.

In this multimodal case study, two lines of inquiry intersect to understand intergenerational learning and interactions. First, there is data collection and analysis on the production of The Good Place, including interviews from the creators and producers; mapping of the show’s plotlines and design; mapping of trends in digital searches regarding the show. Second, there is a month-long case study with ten 6th graders co-watching episodes with adults. The rich and varied data pool offers multiple perspectives to view how this show emerges, floats, and settles within its multigenerational audience. Coupling textual analysis with a case study provides a comparative peek into the creators’ interiority (ideas and motives) driving the show’s engine and the show’s reception. In this way, the inquiry explores the origin story of the pop culture artifact and its afterlives upon dissemination and circulation.

An inquiry into The Good Place offers a buoyant launching pad into multiple reconsiderations of childhoods and popular culture. By tackling existential questions about death, morality, and the afterlife, the adolescents in this study upend narrow adultist conceptions of what matters and experiences children can handle. The show abandons the image of children as naïve and passive recipients and invests in children as critical consumers (Buckingham, 2011; Kidd, 2018) and serves as a paradigm of how to facilitate a flow of understandings and knowledges through various generations. The shared experience and language of a television show engages children as co-conspirators with adults imagining and speculating a better world. The Good Place widens the scope of televised programming for children as well as offers a model of intergenerational television watching.

This project demonstrates the necessity to recognize how children engage with popular culture as well as to reconceptualize how adults engage with children through popular culture. This project is an unlearning of age-based silos of television consumption and limiting assumptions of criticality in childhood. This project is an investment of children and adults as agentic beings who, with proper opportunities, can hermeneutically construct and negotiate meanings of the world.

Author

• Oluwaseun Animashaun, Teachers College, Columbia University