We asked The Good Place’s Michael Schur: Which Game Of Thrones characters were based on Tahani?
In addition to being one of the best shows on TV, The Good Place is a dense knot of running jokes, visual humor, references to dense philosophy tomes, and breadcrumbs for later episodes. In order to help you keep it all straight, The A.V. Club will be annotating the show’s fourth and final season. Catch something that we didn’t? Email us at [email protected]
Read our recap of “Chillaxing.”
A programming note
I’m pressed for time this week, and I also put most of my annotating energy into the biggest and most intriguing of “Chillaxing”’s running jokes, so apologies for the shorter post. Also, and it hurts to admit this while considering the fourth-season episode with the greatest number of explicit philosophy references to date: I’m just going to dispense with the pretense that I know anything about philosophy this week. Besides (and maybe I’ll explore this in greater depth elsewhere), given the trajectory of the past few episodes, I’m beginning to wonder if one of The Good Place’s final epiphanies will be that moral and ethical philosophy is important, but not the all-in-one solution humankind needs.
And now, without further ado, let us consider the truly important things in life: Like which fictional characters were fictionally inspired by a fictional character.
“You should tell him how eight different characters from Game Of Thrones are based on you”
Another thing that pains me about abbreviating this week’s post is that it’s positively spilling over with Tahani Al-Jamil talking about the famous people she knew on Earth. (I do not envy the Vulture staff’s next update to its “Every Celebrity Tahani Has Name-Dropped On The Good Place” list.) But Tahani can forget all the stories about encouraging Timothée Chalamet to get some vitamin D or the tragic tale of the Blake Lively-thrown Leonardo DiCaprio birthday party aboard Paul Allen’s superyacht. If she were trying to get in The A.V. Club’s good graces, all she’d have to do is let us know that there are multiple citizens of Westeros who bear a trace of Tahani. The mind immediately leaps to the regal poise, imperious air, private-quarters sniping, and hidden insecurities of nobility like Cersei Lannister and Margaery Tyrell. The “overlooked child of wealth and privilege” aspects of Tyrion Lannister and Theon Greyjoy seems to fit the bill as well. We later learn that six of these eight characters “would go on the attack” if faced with an adversary like John, so why not Ygritte? Also, she’s tall, so: Brienne.
My A.V. Club colleagues and I knocked around some other names—are her gossiping tendencies more Varys or Littlefinger? Certainly The Queen Of Thorns is in the mix—but I figured “Why not go straight to the source,” so I dropped a line to NBC publicity, who offered to forward some extremely serious email questions about this very short sitcom joke to showrunner Michael Schur. I was forewarned that “it’s not that great of an answer,” but like—if I had to guess—at least three of the Game Of Thrones characters based on Tahani, I pressed on, and will add Schur’s responses to this post when they arrive.
UPDATE: And here they are!
The A.V. Club: How was this joke pitched? Did it begin as eight characters, or was the number attached later?
Michael Schur: No—someone pitched that line and we just put it right into the script.