The Good Place season 3 premiere solves a major plot hole

Note: This article contains really forking mild spoilers for the season three premiere of The Good Place.

Chidi Anagonye has been in the Good Place, which is actually the Bad Place, and now he’s on Earth, which just so happens to be the Confusing Place.

Well, if you’ve been keeping up with Chidi’s heritage, that is.

Fortunately, the mystery of Chidi’s accent has been solved with the season three premiere of The Good Place – even if that explanation is a little unconvincing.

Picking up where we left off in season two, season three begins with Eleanor Shellstrop confronting Chidi in Australia, where he has a distinctly American accent.

Sure, Chidi spoke with an American accent in the Good Place, but that was because its demonic wizardry translated his French to American English for Eleanor.

Rather than having Chidi speak French in an Australian accent back on Earth – or even English with a Senegalese accent – Good Place bosses instead decided to stick with American English.

“I grew up in Senegal so my native language is French, but I went to American school so I also speak English,” Chidi tells Eleanor. “And German, and Greek, and Latin…”

Why does Chidi have an American accent, then? Well, according to The Good Place‘s creator Michael Schur, it was just a helluva lot easier that way.

Speaking to Rolling Stone about the debate over Chidi’s accent, Schur explained the back-and-forth he had with William Jackson Harper, who plays the character.

“We discussed the pros and cons of Chidi speaking French, or Wolof-accented English, or something else,” he said, before adding Harper can actually nail the “pan-African” accent.

“Since we had seen flashbacks with him speaking non-accented English, I got worried it would be confusing – like, were we saying that in the timeline where he never dies, something was different about his life, that now when he spoke English it was accented?” Schur explained.

“Also, he and Kristen [Bell] have such a specific chemistry and rhythm, I was afraid accented English would mess with it somehow, alter it.”

So, there you have it. Chidi speaks English in an American accent in Australia simply because he can. Just don’t ask us about the ethics of that.

The Good Place airs on NBC in the US, with episodes premiering a day later on Netflix in the UK.

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