The Good Place season 4 boss on surprise Timothy Olyphant cameo

There are almost always great things that happen within new episode of The Good Place, but tonight brought us a classic. After all, who better to bring in to appease the Judge than Timothy Olyphant? This was a nice deep-cut reference to earlier on in the season. Not only that, but it was a chance to have the actor, in a way, reprise his old roll as Raylan.

So how was he convinced to take part in all of this? Speaking via TVLine, here’s some of what executive producer Michael Schur had to say:

This is one of the great advantages of breaking, at least big-picture, seasons way in advance. We knew we were going to get to this episode where they needed desperately to keep her attention, and the solution, given four years of her talking about bingeing TV, was to conjure a TV star that would just stand there as eye candy and would buy them some time… Tim was the first guy we thought of, in part because I know him a little bit, and knowing who he is, I thought there was a pretty good chance he would do it.

So I called him and said, “Have you seen the show? Because if you haven’t, this is gonna be really hard to explain…” [Laughs] He had, thankfully. I think he watches it with his kids. And he was like, “I totally get it, I’m in.” We had actually already shot the first couple episodes, but Maya [Rudolph] wasn’t available when we shot them, so we weren’t going to shoot her stuff until later. And I was like, “Oh my God, now this is perfect, because we can retroactively go back and plant from the very beginning of the season that she’s been watching Deadwood.” …

Olyphant is no stranger to comedy, as he was a part of the brilliant-but-canceled series Santa Clarita Diet for three seasons. We’re still bummed about how that ended, but it is admittedly quite fun to see him mix things up and appear on this show in a role that was very much bizarre. We still wish that The Good Place had a chance to survive for more seasons, but we do at least given the writers credit for finding a way in order to keep the excitement rolling so close to the end of the series. Remember, we are very much nearing the end of the road.

What did you think about this surprising Timothy Olyphant cameo on The Good Place season 4?

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