The Jean-Paul Sartre play compared with The Good Place’s first-season twist is “No Exit.”
Sartre’s 1944 existentialist play places three dead strangers in a room in Hell, where they are forced to remain together indefinitely. There are no traditional instruments of torture; instead, the characters’ clashing personalities, secrets, dependence, and judgment become the punishment. The play is associated with Sartre’s famous idea that “hell is other people.”
The comparison fits The Good Place’s first-season reveal. Eleanor, Chidi, Tahani, and Jason believe they are enjoying a paradise designed by Michael, but Eleanor eventually realizes that the neighborhood is actually a Bad Place experiment. The four humans were selected because they could torment one another psychologically and emotionally.
The works are not identical. Sartre’s play uses a single room and three central dead characters, while the television series uses a carefully constructed neighborhood and four human subjects. The shared idea is that an apparently shared afterlife becomes hell because the characters are trapped with people who expose and worsen their deepest flaws.