‘The Good Place’ Creator Michael Schur Talks Friendship With Damon Lindelof

“The Good Place” creator Michael Schur has opened up about how he became friends with “The Leftovers” co-creator Damon Lindelof.

In a recent interview with Vulture, Schur said that he was a fan of Lindelof’s works long before they became buddies. “My wife and I would watch the ‘The Leftovers’ together and we would, like, cry,” said Schur.

Because he loved Lindelof’s writing so much, Schur asked his agent one day to set a meeting with Lindelof. “I wrote an email to my agent and said, ‘I would like you, a grown man, to set me, a grown man, up on a playdate with Damon Lindelof, ostensibly a grown man, because I am just a fan.’ Schur shared. “It was like an arranged date.”

Lindelof, who was also being interviewed with Vulture, said that he and Schur met at Jinkys in Los Angeles and had waffles for breakfast. While that meeting made them closer as friends, Schur said that their friendship became much deeper when he got the idea for “The Good Place.”

“I felt very strongly that I was out of my depth and needed to talk to someone, and so I called Damon and said, ‘Will you meet me for breakfast again? We’re gonna play a game called ‘Is this anything?’ where I tell you an idea for a TV show and you tell me whether it’s anything,” Schur said. “Damon Lindelof saying, ‘This is something’ is the reason that show exists. So thank him, if you like it.”

Schur told A.V. Club back in 2016 that he decided not to pitch “The Good Place” to NBC until he figured out the whole first season after consulting with Lindelof, who co-created “Lost.”

“Damon, in an incredibly smart way, told me, ‘Here are the pitfalls. Here are the traps you can fall into. Here’s the problem you’re going to hit,” Schur recalled. “That was the reason that I didn’t pitch it to NBC until I had the whole idea, because of hearing him [Damon] talk about the process of writing a show that has [similar] qualities [with ‘The Good Place’] and how hard it can be. … I’m so glad that I did that because … when I got the writers together, we laid out the season. We had these tentpoles where we were going and it made it a lot easier to break in the individual episodes.”

While Schur thinks “The Good Place” exists because Lindelof’s believed that “it’s something,” Lindelof said that the Ted Danson and Kristen Bell-led series could still make its way to TV without him in the picture.

“It didn’t, from my vantage point, require any degree of special creative skill, because the premise of the show was undeniably great,” Schur said of “The Good Place.” “It’s very flattering for Michael to say that, but I think anybody in this room who had heard his initial pitch [would say that it’s something]. “It was very baked. I mean, I was sort of expecting a sentence or two, but you had worked out a lot of the fundamental characters and the premise of the show.”

“The Good Place” just ended its Season 2-run earlier this week. In the season finale, Judge Jen (Maya Rudolph) brought Eleanor (Bell), Chidi (William Jackson Harper), Tahani (Jameela Jamil) and Jason (Manny Jacinto) back to Earth to see whether they’re really capable of becoming better people.

“The Good Place” Season 3 is expected to premiere on NBC in the fall.