The Good Place was enjoyable enough as it was. A cute and clever high-concept comedy from the makers of Parks and Recreation that traced the paranoia-filled days of Eleanor Shellstrop (Kristen Bell), a heartless young woman who is accidentally sent to heaven when she should be in hell. But during the series one finale, what had been a smart sitcom was transformed into something else – something gasp-inducingly, mind-bendingly brilliant – all thanks to an earth-shattering twist.
A great plot twist is a thing to be treasured. A floor-buckling revelation that shifts the parameters of a fictional world can leave you reeling for days – sometimes even years. But now the twist is beginning to sprawl outside its natural habitats (the final stretch of a whodunnit; auteur-helmed appointment drama) into less traditional realms, like the sitcom. Alongside The Good Place, there’s Back: the Mitchell & Webb comedy in which Robert Webb plays his Peep Show compadre’s one-time foster brother (is he evil or just extremely lovely?); Search Party, part-mystery noir, part-millennial sadcom, whose twist subverts the entire mystery genre; sci-fi animation Rick and Morty, whose alien adventures are liberally sprinkled with labyrinthine plot twists; and the musical sitcom Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, which examines the tropes of mental illness with, according to Vulture, a “fully developed, Lost-style twist”.
Why has comedy adopted the plot twist? Partly as a ploy to rejuvenate the slightly stale sitcom format: surprises are funny, and a twist in a sitcom is doubly surprising because you don’t expect it to be there. It’s also something that goes hand in hand with the long-brewing trend for high-concept comedy. A group of mates in a flatshare getting off with each other is no longer a captivating enough USP for a comedy in the crowded landscape of on-demand TV: instead you need zombies (Santa Clarita Diet), post-apocalyptic cannibals (Cockroaches), demons (Crazyhead), a very specific 80s subculture setting (GLOW, White Gold) or to double as a highly sophisticated exploration of identity politics (Transparent, Master of None). One of the most hilarious comedies of last year was Channel 4’s The End of The F***king World, a series about a teen psychopath who runs away with a girl from school in order to murder her.
Recently, the real world has been delivering unthinkable plot twists, from Donald Trump’s presidency to the revelation that prolific sex offenders seemingly hid in plain sight in nearly all areas of public life. Not only are viewers’ standards for being genuinely taken off-guard now higher than ever, but recent events mean we’re now constantly anticipating the adrenaline rush of an extreme left-turn. That makes it boom-time for shows with the ability to shake us to the core, such as Charlie Brooker’s tech-centric dark comedy series Black Mirror, which, over its four series, has become steadily more about the world-upending denouement. Also taking cues from old anthology shows like Tales of the Unexpected and The Twilight Zone is Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton’s brilliant BBC series Inside No 9. The pair fuse the horror of those shows with amiable comedy, producing a parade of conscientiously gag-filled half-hour dramas that have become famous for their goosebumpy endings.
But as well as mimicking reality, twists also feel like a relief from it. When comprehending the world correctly feels nigh-on impossible, the twist is a safe outlet for feeling thoroughly wrong. The realisation that you have been deliberately mislead means the burden of parsing reality is lifted for a moment – and it makes trawling through your memory for the lies you gulped down and the false micro-assumptions you made a fun game, rather than a postscript to a disastrous decision.
Comedy’s newfound proclivity for twists also has its roots in something else: internet fan culture. A key ingredient of prestige dramas like Sherlock, Westworld, The Leftovers and Mr Robot is the online conversation around the plot twists, giving geeky fans something to catalogue as well as the chance to try to outwit the shows’ writers (indeed, Westworld’s creator Jonathan Nolan even changed the plot of series two after fans predicted the twist on Reddit). The Good Place has already seen its twist bear fruit in the form of lengthly Reddit threads and reams of fan-directed content, sporting headlines such as “All the Clues You Missed About The Good Place’s Big Finale Twist” and “The Good Place’ Creator Michael Schur Reveals Five Clues About Season 2”.
On the one hand, twist-heavy TV shows make us better viewers. They work as an antidote to compromised attention spans and means those who persevere can appreciate the spine-tingling surprise at the end. On the other, they can produce one-dimensional audiences, greedy for genius twists and merely tolerant of the other forms of storytelling that go into making a TV show. The Good Place has done a sterling job of following up its bombastic revelation with a series of smaller but still very canny twists, there’s little doubt that it’s a case of diminishing returns. While continually blindsiding audiences with gobsmackingly ingenious plot development may not be a particularly sustainable business model for television, in these early days of twisted TV comedy, we can at least sit back and enjoy some brilliantly bumpy rides.
