What I love about The Good Place is that Eleanor was proven right. In the first two episodes, Eleanor declared that the system by which the afterlife runs - one in a million going to heaven while everyone else, even the morally okay people, face eternal torture - is not fair. At the moment it just looks like she’s complaining to justify her being in the Good Place, even if the viewer agrees with her.
But the narrative proves that Eleanor was completely right. Even if the audience agrees with Eleanor, that means nothing unless the narrative agrees as well, and it does. It shows that the elitist method by which the afterlife is run is so corrupt that no one has gotten into the good place for over five hundred years. It shows that holding people to ridiculously high moral standards, like how Tahani was deemed bad despite her good deeds just because she didn’t do anything for the right reasons, is not right, and it isn’t fair for people to be tormented for eternity just because they didn’t have the means to do some incredible thing such as ending slavery, or because they were just an average person, or because they were born in a certain place (those throwaway lines about Florida and France are funny but deeply disturbing).
The narrative begins with Chidi responding to Eleanor’s complaint with “Apparently, that’s not the way things work around here,” essentially saying “The system isn’t fair but this is just how it is.” The narrative is now saying “The system isn’t fair, so we have to change it.”
