A few years ago I interviewed the lyricist-composer Dave Malloy, who had adapted a section of Tolstoy’s War and Peace into the Broadway electropop opera “Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812.” In the opera, the emotional underpinning of the depressed aristocrat Pierre Bezukhov’s life is not the relationship between him and Hélène, his estranged wife, or between Pierre and his unrequited crush, Natasha, but between him and God. “How did I live?” Pierre sings in his defining solo. “Was I kind enough and good enough?”
Back in 2013, during the first Off Broadway run of “Comet,” a character experiencing a religious crisis felt revolutionary, even transgressive. But in the six years since, more and more media aimed at millennials is getting serious about life’s Big Questions. Characters are increasingly likely to worry not just about their romantic prospects, but about their spiritual ones. The most affecting of today’s dramas are about the relationship between human beings and the infinite: a conflict between ordinary mortals and a God more and more of us do not even know how to conceive of, let alone engage with. Think “Good Omens,” “Santa Clarita Diet” or “Chilling Adventures of Sabrina.”
“Hadestown,” “The Good Place” and “Fleabag” tackle life’s big questions.
While at least 40 percent of millennials claim no religion, 72 percent of America’s religiously unaffiliated still believe in a Higher Power, a Great Something. The quintessential millennial experience is not asking whether to believe in something; it is asking what, exactly, are we meant to believe in. While millennials have all too often been accused of solipsism and selfishness—we all come out from underneath Lena Dunham’s rompers—our latest crop of millennial-focused media betrays both moral seriousness and moral curiosity. More and more characters are wrestling with the same question that defined Pierre’s search: How can you be good enough when you’re not even sure what good is?
Among the most on-the-nose dramatizations of this quest is the NBC series “The Good Place,” which follows the postmortem adventures of an admitted dirtbag, Eleanor Shellstrop (Kristen Bell), as she navigates the titular Good Place: a heaven-like suburbia she believes she has been admitted to by mistake. By the close of the series’ first season, we learn that Eleanor isn’t in the Good Place at all, but rather—along with her newfound friend and love interest, the moral philosophy professor Chidi Anagonye (William Jackson Harper)—in a beta test of a new Bad Place that is designed to prove the Sartrean truism that hell is, indeed, other people. Over the course of the subsequent two seasons (a fourth and final season is yet to air), Eleanor and Chidi not only try to escape to the real Good Place but also try to help others get into the Good Place. Disheartened by the realization that seemingly nobody gets into the Good Place (being a truly good person all of the time, it transpires, is all but impossible), they try to bargain with the powers that be. Maybe people can’t always be perfect, they say, but they can get better.
While at least 40 percent of millennials claim no religion, 72 percent of America’s religiously unaffiliated still believe in a Higher Power, a Great Something.
While Eleanor and Chidi’s budding romance makes up a part of the show, it consistently takes a back seat to their friendship—and, in particular, the way the two of them act as what Aristotle once called friends of virtue, encouraging one another to become better people. Eleanor becomes less selfish. Chidi stops spiraling into self-indulgent neurosis.
There isn’t much of a theology, as such, in “The Good Place.” The metaphysical architecture of the afterlife—hell, demons, torture, judges—is structured for comic effect, not spiritual seriousness. The viewing audience is implicitly expected to find the idea of an everlasting hell implausible, and therefore funny. But what “The Good Place” does have, in abundance, is a sense of moral seriousness that takes place in a thematically, if not narratively, godless world. The real question “The Good Place” asks is not what will the afterlife be like, but how do we live if there probably isn’t one? Among the most affecting narrative arcs of the show takes place in its third season, when Chidi and Eleanor are given another chance at life on earth but (erroneously) think that they’re doomed to the Bad Place no matter what they do. Rather than indulge in hedonism (for Eleanor) and anxiety-spiraling (for Chidi), they decide to use their time on earth to save as many other people from the Bad Place as possible and make a Good Place here on earth.
Both “Fleabag” and “The Good Place” are stories about characters’ relationships not just with one another, but with their ideal selves.
That same combination of moral hunger and spiritual uncertainty defines the British television show “Fleabag.” The two-season story of the titular, chain-smoking, compulsively sexual millennial wreck (Phoebe Waller-Bridge, also the show’s writer and creator), “Fleabag” culminates in a wrenching affair between Fleabag and a young, attractive priest (Andrew Scott). What starts out as just another “Fleabag”–patented misadventure—of course the self-sabotaging Fleabag would fall for the most emotionally unavailable man of all—turns into a delicate meditation on what it means to love another person for the better and what it means to love at all.
Fleabag thinks she’s in love with the priest. But as the second season progresses, she comes to another epiphany. “I want someone to tell me what to wear every morning,” she admits to the priest, right there in the confessional. “I want someone to tell me what to eat. What to like, what to hate, what to rage about…what to not joke about. I want someone to tell me what to believe in.” The story of Fleabag is not the story of her relationship with the priest. Nor is it, exactly, the story of her relationship with God. When we leave Fleabag, she is still wandering off the beaten track of faith. But like “The Good Place,” the series is fundamentally the story of a woman wrestling with the Big Questions in what seems to be a godless world. At their core, both “Fleabag” and “The Good Place” are stories about characters’ relationships not just with one another, but with their ideal selves: flawed people learning to be good people.
They are stories about the perennial need for religion—and about the millennial uncertainty about what that religion will look like.
So too “Hadestown,” the Tony Award–winning Broadway musical by Anais Mitchell that has been hailed as a spiritual (and financial) successor to the smash hit “Hamilton.” A modern-day retelling of the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, set in a railroad town reminiscent of old-school New Orleans that sits alongside the track “to hell,” “Hadestown” focuses less on the relationship between its two (relatively thinly drawn) lovers than on what it means for Orpheus to see and enact goodness in the world.
In this version, the mythic bard is working on a song beautiful enough to bring back spring, long absent from the town. Orpheus’s pursuit of that one song—something beautiful enough not just to soften Hades’s heart to restore spring (and implicitly Eurydice, trapped in the underworld), but to make the world “as it should be”—grounds our emotional experience. Orpheus’s final, triumphant love song isn’t to anyone, but rather for everyone: a vision of how the world could be a better place, if only we made it so. Orpheus’s story is (spoiler alert) a tragic one: He turns back to make sure Eurydice is following him out of hell, breaking his agreement with Hades; his own lack of trust in Eurydice (and himself) means that he cannot benefit from the vision of that future. Yet the musical closes with the cast committing to try, once more, next spring, to make the world not just a better place, but the place it morally, spiritually, ethically, should be.
Central to all three contemporary pieces is the implication of atheism, or at least a non-Christian metaphysic. The call to goodness is purely existential: things are terrible, life is meaningless and chaotic, but try to be a good person anyway. It is a tragic vision of the world, hopeful only in the call for human resistance against that meaninglessness.
In the absence of a Christian conception of divine grace, the most we can hope for is what happens at the end of the Greek myth in “Hadestown”: a failure of human will, a tragic recognition and a promise to try to do better next time—a promise we know will fail. (Of all the Greek myths, Orpheus and Eurydice is the one where we most long for a deus ex machina: a god who will not let Orpheus turn back). At their best, all three pieces explore that failure and that tragic hope. In so doing, they reflect a much greater cultural hunger for stories that deal authentically not with a purely “secular” world, but one in which Christian answers no longer commonly feed spiritual need.
They are stories about the perennial need for religion—and about the millennial uncertainty about what that religion will look like.
This article appears in August 5 2019.
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