Org Charts in Hell

May 23, 2025

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been watching The Good Place. It’s a sitcom about morality, ethics, and who gets into Heaven. Hannah and I gave it a shot during the pandemic, but we didn’t get into it and stopped a couple of episodes in. For some reason, we tried again and it clicked this time around. The show follows a selfish woman who mistakenly ends up in a heaven-like afterlife (the “Good Place”) as she tries to become a better person to avoid being found out. Don’t read further if you plan to watch, because there are spoilers.

Eventually, it’s revealed that the “Good Place” is actually a psychological torture experiment run by demons, which backfires as her friends, other humans, begin to improve morally. The premise is creative, and the writing is pretty good (though ridiculous at times). However, I can’t stop noticing one weird thing: even in the afterlife, characters are trapped in capitalist logic. The demons have jobs, they scheme for access to fun projects, and compete for influence with their bosses. These are org charts in literal hell.

Watching the show, I kept thinking about how hard it is for creativity to escape our lived experience. The producers can’t imagine a world without the constraints of capitalism, so they unintentionally make the afterlife a corporate hellscape. Why else would the characters want to torture each other if not for the promise of a promotion? Along the same lines, all powerful omniscient gods or demons would not be excited about Pizza Hut and Taco Bell, or for that matter frogs, yet that’s where the characters land their jokes. It’s not about convenient plot devices, it’s a reflection of what the writers can’t imagine away, and what audiences expect.

Yes, there’s an incentive to make the show approachable and funny, and the writers have to balance audience expectations with the absurdity of the premise, but it’s still hard to ignore that the characters end up in an uncanny valley of anthropocentrism. There’s some pervasive cultural gravity that the show can’t escape. Creative works often fail to imagine truly other worlds.

Demons having existential crises over losing their jobs, or “not believing they get paid for this” simply mirrors our own life’s narratives. As I tried to describe this idea, I wanted a word for it. The closest I got was anachronistic, but that’s not it. It’s something similar where whatever is out of place is off in a dimension that isn’t time.

Makes you wonder—if demons have KPIs, are we already in the Bad Place?¹

Thanks to Hannah Doherty for her feedback on early drafts of this post.

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Photo: Hellbirds, by me. Previously posted on San Francisco Hellscapes, 2020.

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