Why ‘The Good Place’ Season 1 Only Has 13 Episodes

NBC’s “The Good Place” is one of the few new TV sitcoms that have been well-received by critics and viewers alike. But why didn’t the network order additional episodes of the series this season?

In a recent interview with TVLine, series creator Michael Schur explained why Season 1 of “The Good Place” only consists of 13 episodes. “When I pitched the show to NBC, I felt pretty strongly it was kind of a big swing, and everything was gonna be really heavily serialized,” Schur shared. “It just felt like it made sense to keep that to a shorter season. And they very kindly and reasonably agreed with that.”

The two-time Primetime Emmy winner added that “The Good Place” isn’t a “you can do as many of these as you want” kind of a show, so it’s more difficult to sustain if the network orders “22 or 24 episodes, versus 13 or so.”

Schur revealed that the abbreviated season also works for the two lead actors of the show. “Kristen [Bell] has been doing seasons that long for a while now [e.g. Showtime’s ‘House of Lies’]. Ted [Danson] had been doing ‘CSI,’ which obviously there are way more of. And doing that for a long time gets kind of exhausting. So everybody in every direction wanted the same thing,” Schur said.

While the freshman run of “The Good Place” has shorter episode order than most network comedies out there, it doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s much easier to make.

Schur told The Frame last month that the mere fact that “The Good Place” is set in afterlife was a “risky thing.” Another factor that made the series more challenging to develop was Schur’s intention to make it a heavily serialized series. “In many cases, the episodes pick up in the instant that the previous one left off. That’s a little bit risky for a network show,” he said.

Schur worked out the entire season of the series before pitching its pilot to the Peacock Network. “I worked on it for months and months to get it all lined up. So by the time I pitched it, if they had questions like about how does this sustain itself, where does it go, what’s the future of the show, I was able to answer them,” he said.

Schur revealed to A.V. Club last September that he even consulted “Lost” co-creator Damon Lindelof while developing “The Good Place.”

“That was the reason that I didn’t pitch it to NBC until I had the whole idea, because of hearing him [Damon] talk about the process of writing a show that has [similar] qualities [with ‘The Good Place’] and how hard it can be,” Schur said. “I’m so glad that I did that because … when I got the writers together, we laid out the season. We had these tentpoles where we were going and it made it a lot easier to break in the individual episodes.”

“The Good Place” returns to NBC on Thursday, Jan. 5, 2017 at 8:30 p.m. EST. Check out the synopsis for Season 1, episode 10, titled “Chidi’s Choice,” below:

“Eleanor (Bell) makes a surprising personal discovery. Meanwhile, Michael (Danson) tasks an indecisive Chidi (William Jackson Harper) with coming to an important decision and Jianyu (Manny Jacinto) makes a big announcement.”