Neighborhood 12358W, more commonly known as "The Good Place" is Michael's first independent project as an architect for The Bad Place. It is the principal setting of the series The Good Place from Chapter 1 to Chapter 23.
History
Michael's "Good Place" Neighborhood was Michael's first project as an independent architect for The Bad Place. After being an apprentice for 200 years he was finally given the chance to design his own neighborhood, not wanting to do a paint-by-numbers neighborhood he instead pitch to his bosses his own version: a neighborhood were the inhabitants think they are in The Good Place but actually torture each other psychologically.
His bosses agreed but stated that if it didn't work, Michael would face retirement.
Function
How Michael's neighborhood was meant to work was he had selected 4 humans that would all in one way torture each other without them knowing while the remaining 318 residents were demons playing the part of humans in paradise. It was structured around Michael posing as a Good Place architect and 2 humans believing they were meant to be in The Good Place with the other two thinking there had been a mix up and them trying to remain undiscovered. The ultimate goal was to get the 4 humans to torture each other without them knowing for 1000 years.
Problem
The main problem with Michael's neighborhood is that one of humans would eventually figure out that they were in fact in The Bad Place. After this Michael would wipe the memory of the humans and start over but the process would repeat itself over and over again, 802 times. The reboots would never last longer than 11 months and eventually Michael gave up and joined forces with Eleanor, Chidi, Jason and Tahani in order to avoid retirement.
Trivia
- Eleanor is almost always the one who figures out that they are in The Bad place.
- At least one time Jason was the first one to figured out they were in the bad place.
- If Michael has rebooted his neighborhood over 800 times with the longest time lasting 11 months and the average reboot only going for 5 months. It is possible that (from Michael's perspective) this has been going on close to 400 years.
- 12358 are the first five numbers in the Fibonacci sequence.
- The "town" exteriors are shot on the "Little Europe" lot at Universal Studios Hollywood (and can be visited on the Universal Studios public tour). The Chinese Gardens location is at the Huntington Botanical Gardens in nearby San Marino.