The Good Place (NBC marketing photograph)

“Heaven got another angel.”

I have heard people use this well-intentioned cliché to rationalize some of the most painful and pointless deaths. I’ve heard it used to comfort people after witnessing a long struggle with illness. After freak accidents. After yet another person from my hometown mysteriously “passed away” in their mid-thirties. And even in the midst of a global pandemic.

My unease with this adage is not rooted merely in skepticism. While I do not believe in an afterlife, I of course cannot rule it out. Instead, I object to the laziness of it. The assumption that, at a certain point, a button gets pressed, and all our problems are solved, all regrets erased. Life after death already seems implausible. But a perfectly happy life that lasts forever? That sounds nonsensical. And on top of that, it’s hard to ignore how people’s conception of the next life can often dictate how they live this one. Perhaps that’s often for the best, but when it goes wrong, it really goes wrong, becoming an unfalsifiable rationalization for wingnuttery, science denial, and death cults.

Thanks in part to years of withering criticism and theological splintering, the threat of hell appears to be losing its ability to scare us. Fewer Americans believe in hell than heaven, and in recent years many Christian leaders have tried to downplay the concept of eternal damnation. I can recall, for example, the principal of my high school, a Catholic priest, assuring us that a classmate who had died of suicide would not go to hell, despite Church doctrine. The priest simply did not believe in a God that would do such a thing. But while hell continues to shrink in our collective imagination, the promise of heaven remains baked into our culture, seemingly impervious to scrutiny, and even the most skeptical among us have been trained to reach for this impossible carrot.

But recently, the mockery of heaven has begun to catch up with the ridicule and revulsion directed toward hell within popular culture. Leading the way is a handful of high-concept sitcoms that have dared to take on this golden calf. Of course, The Good Place springs to mind first in this group, but the short-lived Forever, as well as the more recent Upload, have also depicted heaven — or something like it — in a way that not only pokes fun, but challenges and deconstructs this most cherished idea in mainstream American Christianity. Together, they represent a steady normalization of skepticism toward heaven, a development that Christian leaders have noticed, some with amusement, some with alarm.

Please be advised, the remainder of this article contains spoilers.

Amazon’s Forever may be the most subtle of this group, focusing entirely on the frayed relationship of June (Maya Rudolph) and Oscar (Fred Armisen). Upon their untimely deaths, the husband and wife find themselves in an empty suburban home, which they discover is tastefully decorated and permanently stocked with everything they need. Not exactly heaven, but safe, comfortable, and no doubt better than these presumably irreligious protagonists expected. June arrives after her husband has been there for some time, and quickly accepts that this place has no god, and no discernible purpose. “What’s the point of all this?” she wonders. “Well, what was the point of the thing before this?” Oscar replies.

Before long, boredom begins to catch up with June. In an episode that almost feels like a horror flick, she and Oscar are driven to paranoia when the arrival of a new neighbor disrupts their endless routine. The neighbor, a woman named Case (Catherine Keener), encourages June to explore the area outside of their cul-de-sac, leading her on an adventure that eventually tears her away from Oscar.

A persistent theme dogs the characters: that “together forever” may be a laughably absurd ideal. And because of that — or because heaven may not be real at all — the show emphasizes the need to be honest and compassionate in this world. In the finale, the couple reunite in the hopes of going on a new journey together. “We just had our first honest conversation ever,” June observes. “Too bad it wasn’t when we were alive,” Oscar notes. The message is clear: even heaven may not give you a second chance.

In contrast to the subtlety and slower pace of Forever, Upload (Amazon) is a bleak satire that crams in a murder mystery alongside the comedy. Once again, we meet doomed lovers (Nathan and Ingrid) who are growing sick of one another. But before they can have the big talk about their future, Nathan (Robbie Amell) is mortally injured in a car crash. When Ingrid (Allegra Edwards) pressures him to upload his consciousness into a corporate-controlled simulation of the afterlife, where she will eventually join him forever, an alarmed Nathan says what we’re all thinking: “Forever is a long time.” But he goes along with it, and emerges in the posh but dull Lakeview Hotel, where his virtual existence depends on Ingrid financing his data plan. Nathan’s only human connection is with Nora (Andy Allo), his “angel” who acts as both customer service rep and therapist, nudging him toward a path that could redeem his wasted life.

Written by Greg Daniels of The Office, Upload has some of the darkest comedy of the last decade. Fatal car accidents, body horror, and corporate dystopia are played for laughs. But the bleakest part is the pure crassness of this new heaven, something many Christian reviewers criticized as “revisionist” and utterly “false.” Either intentionally or not, the writers struck a nerve by digging into a deep philosophical problem with the traditional view of the afterlife. Much like Lakeview, heaven is, at its core, a gated community, shielding the chosen ones from the undesirables. Forever.

Of course, the show that drew the most attention — as well as the strongest reactions from fans and haters alike — was NBC’s The Good Place, which arguably started this trend. For four seasons, viewers followed a group of flawed people trying to get to paradise, all within a cartoonish satire of Western suburbia and corporate culture. Thus, from the beginning, even the grumpiest atheists in the audience looked forward to the finale, when our heroes would find their reward. Heaven would get a few more angels, and everything would be fine. But no, in the last two episodes, the writers aimed their satirical sights on heaven itself, a decision that many viewers found unnecessary at best, confusing and insulting at worst.

A brief recap. Following her embarrassing death, Eleanor Shelstrop (Kristen Bell) finds herself in the titular Good Place. The only problem: she doesn’t belong. Though the heavenly records state that she is a philanthropist, she is in fact a selfish drunk who has landed there by accident. By the end of season one, Eleanor figures out that she and her friends are actually in the Bad Place, as part of a Sartre-esque torture method devised by a demon named Michael (Ted Danson).

In this universe, people get to the Good Place through a point system that measures their moral actions. Yet the modern world has become so complex that even outwardly nice behavior can have harmful consequences. As a result, not a single person has made it to the Good Place in centuries. To fix this, Eleanor and her friends — now with the help of Michael, who has switched sides — come up with a new process in which the recently deceased will have a chance to develop and grow in the afterlife. Along the way, our heroes undergo their own purification, becoming empathetic, caring people, willing to risk their eternal souls to save humanity.

In the final episodes, when they finally arrive at the real Good Place, Eleanor and company discover that its inhabitants have become so bored that they have lost the will to live (eternally). Even the council that runs the Good Place is sick of it. When Michael arrives, they immediately place him in charge and run away.

To cure what ails the perpetually happy, Eleanor’s team proposes a way out: a doorway that leads to annihilation, which people can walk through when they are ready. This new limit on paradise restores meaning to life by forcing people to value their experiences because they may never come again, just like they did (or should have done) on Earth.

Such a simple solution is not without its critics. Philosophy professor Pamela Hieronymi, an advisor to the show, has said that removing the time limit on life would not “suddenly deprive it of meaning.” But this meaninglessness does not arrive suddenly. Instead, it develops over an immeasurable period of time, as the protagonists achieve all they wish to achieve. They right past wrongs, heal old wounds, and help others. And only then, with a sense of peace rather than despair, do they walk through the door.

Though The Good Place is not overtly political, this dismantling of the “angels in heaven” model certainly feels political. As the past year has shown, too many people are willing to justify some terrible things by citing the concerns of the world to come. In showing that eternal bliss is simply not a good reward, The Good Place challenges the moral rationalizations a person can make in order to secure prime real estate in the afterlife. Your crazy aunt on Facebook might tell you otherwise. And you can ask her, “what happens if I do things your way, only to get bored in heaven?” At the very least, it might get her to post harmless kitten memes instead.

It follows that the critical response to The Good Place tends to be divided politically, with more progressive-leaning reviewers taking delight in the show’s cheekiness, and more conservative outlets taking offense — which I suppose is a marker of effective satire. Much of the pushback against the finale has focused on the doorway to annihilation. A review in Christianity Today described it as an “atheistic cosmic euthanasia.” Another rejected the idea of death as a reward, calling it a “damning meditation on what it means to be human.” And indeed, there are moments in the episode where a person’s decision to leave the Good Place affects those around them in ways that are similar to suicide. In the show’s most emotional scene, Eleanor tearfully begs her partner Chidi (William Jackson Harper) to stay. Chidi, however, calmly explains that he is returning to the state he was in before he was born, like a wave returning to the ocean.

To be fair, there are plenty of self-identified Christian reviewers who had no problem with this aspect of the show. One Catholic site likened the journey to purgatory, while a progressive Christian blog praised the writers for sparking discussion between Western and Eastern religious traditions. For me, the annihilation depicted in the show represents another step into the unknown, similar to the mysterious “Great Beyond” depicted in Disney’s recent animated feature Soul. The script carefully avoids saying that someone “dies” (whatever that would mean in the afterlife) when they go through the door. Instead, their fate is in keeping with the theme of self-improvement that animates the series. The characters are absorbed into the universe, and their goodness permeates the world. This may not make sense to some viewers, which makes it similar to every other prediction of what’s waiting for us on the other side.

Many critics focused on the question of whether paradise could get boring. Their answer: It won’t. Okay? It just won’t. “Biblical imagery suggests a dynamic, productive and creative existence,” one reviewer insists. Maybe, but eternity might do more than just make things tedious. It might also sap the world of meaning. Why make up with your abusive father now when you can do it in, say, a million years? And a billion years after that, will you even recall that million-year gap? How would any of that matter in an endless void of time? In such a universe, you could fight and make up in an infinite loop.

To their credit, this same reviewer concedes that endless happiness is unimaginable from our mortal point of view, which is why people should trust the indescribable power of the Creator. While I can’t argue with such a vague promise, I also can’t help but think of the brainstorming session that the Good Place council leaves behind when they abandon their posts and run away. Among their hastily scribbled ideas to keep things interesting: more hoverboards, and “music you can eat.” I have to wonder if the trust we would need to make this all work could also have an expiration date, at which point even the hoverboards will fail to pass the time.

But the most consistent criticism of the show, going back to its debut, is the sheer godlessness of this world. Many reviewers have argued that the Good Place is broken precisely because it takes God out of the equation, a problem that the writers either fail to see, or refuse to address. As one writer for a church site explains, true salvation is given through grace, not earned through a point system.

Perhaps what really troubles some viewers is the possibility that The Good Place is a harbinger of the changing American religious landscape, one that promises to be more fragmented and secularized. Much like the main characters from Upload and Forever, Eleanor and her friends are never associated with any religious tradition, nor are they identified as atheists, agnostics, or even as “nones.” Rather than having an antagonistic relationship with religion, they are completely apathetic toward the supernatural. God is as irrelevant to their concerns as witchcraft or alchemy. And, as one reviewer noted, none of the characters seem eager to have a so-called traditional family, that marker of good Christian adulthood. Their lives, their goals, their entire worldview has been scrubbed clean of the divine, a kind of secular absolution.

While some will read that and despair, I would remind them that Eleanor and her friends fill the “god-shaped holes” in their lives not with hedonism and pettiness, but with a quest to improve themselves, and to help those around them. Instead of being handed meaning from above, they create their own, then test it, use it, and make the world a better place with it. In the coming years, as the religious landscape continues to change, there will be more stories pointing in this direction, showing how people can be good in this life, precisely because they know it’s the only one they’ll get. After all, Earth could use a few more angels.

Robert Repino is an editor of religious studies and history for Oxford University Press, and occasionally teaches for the Gotham Writers Workshop. He is the author of several works of fiction, including the science fiction novel Mort(e) from Soho Press and the middle grade novel Spark and the League of Ursus from Quirk Books.