The Good Place: entertaining shows

Mike Schur is a genius, and perhaps one of the kindest souls working in Hollywood today. After getting his start as a writer on SNL, he became one of the lucky few to be hand selected by showrunner Greg Daniels to be a writer for The Office - the one who played Dwight's cousin Mose, to be specific.

After having the opportunity to shine there, he signed and overall deal with NBC, and joined Daniels in the creation of another major hit, Parks and Recreation. After that, he created yet another smash-hit, Brooklyn Nine-Nine, with Dan Goor.

After the success of that show, Schur had undeniably proven himself to be a Golden Goose, and NBC decided to hand him a blank slate project - a TV show that he could literally make into whatever he wanted. That's when he created The Good Place.

But where did this writer - mostly known for workplace comedies centered around the absurdism of the mundane - get the idea for this metaphysical show about a broken afterlife system and a hell disguised as paradise?

While driving, of course.

According to The New York Times, it was sitting in Los Angeles traffic that sent Schur "into a philosophical tailspin."

"As he watched other drivers use the emergency lane to escape the gridlock, he started fuming about people who put their desires above everyone else's, then wondered if such minor ethical lapses even matter.

What started as a flash of irritation yielded an idea: What if there were a cosmic point system that tallied our good and bad behavior, and ranked people accordingly? From then on, when Schur saw drivers misbehaving, he would comfort himself by imagining them losing 15 points on their moral score cards."

Eventually, this little game-slash-coping-mechanism bloomed into an entire system with a plot behind it. After that, he got Kristen Bell and Ted Danson on board, and the rest is history.

The Good Place Ended after four seasons, and while Schur himself was the one who decided that the story had come to its natural conclusion, he realized after it was all over that he still felt unsatisfied, like he wasn't quite done wrestling with the concept of the moral good.

So, he did what any writer would do - he wrote a book.

On Tuesday, Simon and Schuster will release Michael Schur's first book, How to Be Perfect: The Correct Answer to Every Moral Question. The text has already recieved reccommendations from Steve Carrell, Amy Poehler, Mindy Kaling, and Ted Danson, as well as Jeff McMahan, a philosophy professor at Oxford. (Quite a crew.)

In approximately 300 pages, the book gives a sort of rundown on the history of moral philosophy, making sure readers have the basics, but in the context of more modern dilemmas and ethical issues.

Schur explained why he felt his book would be a valuable contribution to the field of philosophy:

"The smartest people who ever lived have been working really hard for thousands of years to try to explain to us how we can be better people, and how we can improve ourselves, but they wrote so complicatedly and densely and opaquely that no one wants to engage with it.

"It's like a chef had come up with a recipe for chocolate chip cookies that were both delicious and also helped you lose weight, but the recipe was 600 pages long and written in German, and no one read it. And I thought, if we could just translate that to, like, a human language, this would be very helpful."

So, if you want an entry-level guide on how to get into The Good Place - or you want a literal crash course on philosophy - make sure you pick up a copy of Michael Schur's How To Be Perfect, in stores January 25.

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Steve Carell, Amy Poehler, Mindy kaling, Ted Danson, Kristen Bell