Forget your Night King sneak-attacks, your Riverdale bear maulings, your Bent-Neck Ladies. The biggest twist of the 2018-2019 TV season was Hot Chidi on The Good Place, case closed, and I will not be taking questions at this time. To be clear, this twist is not a reflection on actor William Jackson Harper, who has always played Chidi like an anxious little snack. Chidi being hot is not the surprise. Hot Chidi is the surprise, and Hot Chidi is really more of a state of mind.
“Jeremy Bearimy,” the fourth episode of The Good Place Season 3, upended the NBC sitcom’s entire premise for probably the 87th time in that season alone. Chidi, Eleanor (Kristen Bell), Tahani (Jameela Jamil), and Jason (Manny Jacinto), who’d all been sent back to Earth to test Michael’s (Ted Danson) belief that people can change for the better, were accidentally exposed to the truth about what happens when you die — which effectively doomed them all, since knowing about the points system corrupted their motivation for doing good. Learning they were eternally damned prompted varied reactions from the Soul Squad: Tahani and Jason got charitable, while Eleanor tried to go full Arizona Dirtbag (it didn’t stick). But it was Chidi — a man who devoted his entire life to ethical problem-solving only to discover that it would get him nowhere, that his fate was out of his own hands, and that time in the afterlife doesn’t move in a straight line but instead loops around like someone writing “Jeremy Bearimy” in cursive — who really lost it. That dot over the i just broke our boy.
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Aimless and despondent, Chidi wandered Sydney, where he was approached by a man in a red bandanna who asked if he wanted to talk to God. The exact same thing — in the same city — happened to Kevin Garvey Sr. (Scott Glenn) on The Leftovers, a show about the question of what people do when the world suddenly stops making sense. (The Good Place creator Mike Schur got advice from Damon Lindelof, who co-created The Leftovers and Lost, while he was plotting the big twists of Season 1.) Chidi couldn’t even freak out about how nothing has meaning without encountering some hidden meaning. He scared the man away by quoting Nietzsche at him, and as a reward for doing all that homework, the show gave the thirsty audience a drink, dousing the good professor in sprinkler water.
This apparently turned Chidi into another long-lost Hemsworth brother. In one impressively smooth move, he stripped off his sweater vest and his button-down shirt, dropped them on the ground, and walked off with nothing but his khaki pants and all those abs.
Chidi was, and I cannot stress this enough, ripped.
Harper recently told TV Guide he was “scared sh–less” filming the scene and isn’t eager to strip off his shirt on-camera again anytime soon, so I should probably send him an Edible Arrangement for contributing to his continued objectification. But Hot Chidi prompted a conversation that made the internet less of a Bad Place. Some questioned whether it was realistic to expect a character that bookish to exercise that much, inspiring Vulture to ask whether Shirtless Chidi was in fact “too swole.” But of course The Good Place had seen its own future (Jeremy Bearimy, baby) and planted the seeds for this reveal in Season 1, when Eleanor described Chidi as “surprisingly jacked.” Hot Chidi is canon compliant, kids!
William Jackson Harper, The Good Place
It wasn’t just about the shirtlessness. Even when Chidi did put on a shirt — a skin-tight lavender tee with the slogan “Who What When Where… Wine!” — it only shifted the focus from his abs to his biceps. Chidi was very much still Hot Chidi in that shirt. He gave a cashier his car keys for keeps (“Do you guys have like a take-a-car, leave-a-car tray?”) and taught an ethics class in the throes of a full existential meltdown while stirring Peeps into chili. (“It makes it taste bad.”) Harper did some of his best work on the show as Chidi crumbled, pasting a panicked smile beneath dead eyes. Here was a man who’d been handed a kind of death sentence. Harper made it hilarious, but he also grounded Chidi’s aimlessness in real despair. More than any of the other three members of the Soul Squad, it was Chidi who sold the stakes of eternal damnation.
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And that’s the thing, my little chili babies: Hot Chidi is so much more than abs. Hot Chidi is the logical endpoint of a corrupted system. Hot Chidi is Gen X detachment and Millennial ennui. Hot Chidi is a Wine Mom. Hot Chidi was the greatest unifying force of the TV season. In this climate, that’s a twist.
Because this is such a competitive category, TV Guide wanted to take this opportunity to shout-out all the runners-up who just barely missed out on the honor of Biggest Twist: Beck’s death in YOU, even though we all should have seen it coming; Archie getting “killed” by a bear in Riverdale, in part because of how quickly he recovered in time to take his SATs; and The OA breaking the fourth wall, because we didn’t think that this show could get any weirder.
Source : TVGuide
