We Asked the Creator of "The Good Place" How Chidi Got His Hands on Peeps in Australia

Plus, everything else you want to know about The Good Place going Down Under.

The third glorious season of The Good Place, our favourite afterlife-set sitcom that calls on viewers to reckon with their moral code, may have moved on from its Sydney setting, but we have not.

The early eps of S3 saw Eleanor (Kristen Bell), Chidi (William Jackson Harper), Tahani (Jameela Jamil) and Jason (Manny Jacinto) resurrected and sent back to Earth, where they reunited in Sydney as part of a spiritual test set by demon Michael (Ted Danson) and the all-knowing Janet (D’arcy Carden).

And Aussie viewers following along with the show on Netflix were delighted, gobbling up its many Easter Eggs left by showrunner Michael Schur and his teams of writers and production designers.

We documented them all, right here.

However, even though the 'Soul Squad' has left Sydney behind, we couldn’t officially let go until we got Schur on the phone to give us the scoop on those authentic Aussie references, and to also explain the most egregious missteps made in their depiction of our proud nation.

You know what we’re talking about: the scene where Chidi uses Peeps to make chili.

"Someone pitched that because he’s having a nervous breakdown, he just sort of mixes in peanut M&Ms and Peeps and stuff," Schur explains to Student Edge.

"We looked it up immediately and found that Peeps were not for sale in Australia. And then, we loved the idea of him mixing in Peeps in the chili so much, and it made us laugh so hard, that we decided—and I’m not kidding, we actually had this conversation—part of the discussion of the season and part of what you learn is that Michael and Janet coming down to Earth has altered the timeline of Earth, right? And various things are different, or turn out differently. England leaves Europe because of their meddling, somehow. It’s a 'butterfly flapping its wings' kind-of thing.

"And what we decided as our internal explanation for why Chidi can buy Peeps, is that that is one of things that has changed in the alternate timeline that has now been created on Earth. Peeps were not available in Australia, and then Janet and Michael went down and then a butterfly flapped its wings, and a bunch of things got screwed up and changed in the timeline, and one of the things was Peeps is now for sale in Australian grocery stores."

We ask if he likes being able to offer that excuse to any annoying interviewers who try to point out plot holes in his show.

"Yes, it’s wonderful," he says.

"It’s a great catch-all explanation for anything that’s either intentional, like that, or that we just forgot about and kind-of screwed up."

Here’s everything else you wanted to know about The Good Place in Australia, but were afraid to ask.

The reason S3 was set in Sydney (but filmed in Los Angeles):

"We wanted [Chidi] to be from the complete other side of the world from where Eleanor came from," Schur says.

"We wanted his life to be so different from hers that she’d have absolutely no frame of reference. We put them on the complete opposite ends of the globe, so that there’s no overlapping biography at all. That was the main idea. And the other thing is, practically speaking, Australia… I think at some level we thought, 'Well, we know we’re at least going to do flashbacks to him in Australia. We may someday want to go to Australia.' Australia and L.A. have essentially the same climate, the same look and the same vegetation, and Sydney and L.A. look very similar, so it was a little bit practical because it felt like, 'If we ever want to go there, it’ll be easy to pretend that we’re there.'"

Yes, some of those references were intentionally dumb:

"Part of the fun of all of the references we made was, 'What are the laziest things we can think of that we know about Australia?'" he laughs.

"It’s intentionally kind-of basic, is the way to put it. It’s just koalas and the Sydney Opera House and kangaroos and Crocodile Dundee. Whenever we found the opportunity to make a reference to anything, it was, 'What is something anybody knows about Australia that we can just cram in here?' We did it a million times. We did a bunch of characters who had Australian celebrity names where we just transposed the first letter of their first and last name, just to be silly."

The origin of the 'Thatsnota' & 'Thisisa' street signs:

"The culminating joke for me was, we had this running joke where we saw a flashback of Chidi in Season 1, and he was in a restaurant, so we decided to name the restaurant Eating Nemo, which is just a super lazy joke," Schur says.

"That started this thing where anytime we were in any establishment that needed a name, it was a gerund and then 'Nemo'. So there was a bar called Drinking Nemo. And then we had a café called French-Pressing Nemo. And we just kept doing it over and over again. So we found a piece of stock video that we used for the exterior of this café we called French-Pressing Nemo, so we digitally inserted the sign on the front of the café. And insanely, this piece of stock footage video had street signs out front that were blank. I have no idea why, but they literally were blank street signs for the corner of this street that the café was on. I was like, 'Well, now you’re just asking for it, universe. If you’re gonna tempt me like that, there’s no way I’m not gonna do this.'

"So we made it the corner of 'Thatsnota St' and 'Thisisa St', and to me that is the culmination of all these dumb Australian jokes we’ve done all year. That’s the most hacky, old-timey, 'We know nothing about Australia except for what we learnt in Crocodile Dundee' information. I think that was the end of it. That was our final salvo in the endless Australia jokes that we made."

Who had the bright idea to put in Australian electrical sockets?

"It’s mostly production design," Schur says, adding, "It’s funny. You’re the second person, at least, maybe the third, from Australia to mention the sockets."

"Anything that’s like that, the tiny detail in the wall or a prop in the background, that’s almost always production design. That’s the production team going, 'Okay, we know we’re gonna be in Australia, let’s do a ton of research and really get everything right.'

"They really worked overtime to try to get all of those details right, and they took a tremendous amount of pride in their work. So they’ll be very happy to know that something like getting the sockets right was noted by people who were actually living in Australia. That will actually matter very greatly to them."

Isn’t it stressful always remaking the show and changing its setting (from different countries to different planes of existence)?

"It’s both sort-of scary and also the most fun part of the show," Schur says.

"It was part of the design of the show from very early on, that we were just gonna move really fast and chew up a lot of story, and things that would normally happen in the season finale, we’re gonna move up and have them happen in the middle of the season, and things that would normally happen in Season 4 were gonna happen in Season 2.

"Because we have this plan, from the beginning, it’s been crazy but we’ve been prepared for it."

Read More:

How Authentic Is The Good Place Version of Australia? An Investigation

New episodes of The Good Place S3 debut on Netflix in Australia every Friday.

Header Image: Netflix