The Good Place's Jeremy Bearimy joke came from a writer sick of Mike Schur's philosophizing

The Good Place’s “Jeremy Bearimy” is one of the funniest episodes of TV to air this year, with most of its laugh coming courtesy of star William Jackson Harper, whose portrayal of earnest truth-seeker Chidi’s shirtless collapse into existential despair is, frankly, a revelation (“You put the Peeps in the chili pot, and eat them both up!”). But Harper’s amazing work wouldn’t make much sense without the central joke that lends the episode its name, the revelation that time in The Good Place universe isn’t so much a straight line, as it is a shape best visualized as a sweeping cursive signature for a guy with the adorably absurd moniker “Jeremy Bearimy.”
The reveal that, yes, reality actually works that way is the best sort of meta gag for the NBC sitcom, poking fun at the show’s endlessly iterating set of rules and systems, full of “afterlife points,” Medium Places, and burrito-scarfing, reality TV-addicted omniscient Judges. It also came from a real place of frustration with the series’ tendency toward rules-y naval gazing, as one of its writers recently revealed during a panel at Vulture Festival. Per Vulture, new Good Place writer Rae Sanni was attempting to get showrunner Mike Schur to explain how the show’s various time travel shenanigans work, and repeatedly pointed out that none of what he was saying actually, you know, made sense.