You Can Turn Your Internet Into 'The Good Place' With This Forkin' Awesome Chrome Extension
If life is starting to feel like total bullshirt, at least your internet won't. That is, with the help of a handy The Good Place Chrome extension. If Google Chrome is your default browser, you can transform it into the high-concept NBC comedy complete with Janet (D'Arcy Carden) taking over the Google page. Let's call it The Google Place.
NBC's latest marketing strategy tied to the acclaimed comedy starring Ted Danson and Kristen Bell is a brilliant feat of homepage maneuvering. And it comes just in time for The Good Place season 2 to land on Netflix, making all the seasons of the show about a group of people residing in (what they think) is a heavenly afterlife available to stream.
The Chrome extension has a lot of nifty features. When you open a new window or tab after installing the extension, you'll get a notification tell you where you've ended up. The options are pretty limited — it's either the Good Place, the Bad Place, or back on Earth. I guess that train to the Medium Place has trouble reaching the internet. The weather and schedule widgets are customized to each of the locations (it apparently rains scorpions in the Bad Place quite a lot).
There are also controls for various Good Place quirks: an obscenities censor (fork yeah!), an option to replace YouTube's voting options with either Good Place or Bad Place, a productivity reminder called "Joy of Missing Out," and best of all, a Google or Yahoo home page that is transformed into "Ask Janet."
It would be great if the extension took things a step further and transformed all the results into Janet's trademark witticisms — "I live in a boundless void" and "Fun fact: Columbus is in the Bad Place because of all the raping, slave trade, and genocide" are among my favorites.
This is the first time I've seen a marketing gimmick actually prove to have a productive component as well — the "Joy of Missing Out" feature encourages you to step away from your device after either half an hour, an hour, or two hours. But then again, this is The Good Place, a show that basically exists to trick us into learning basic philosophy.
I'm definitely going to keep The Good Place Chrome extension on my browser until the beloved comedy returns for season 3 on September 27, 2018. It's the perfect tiny digital oasis in the dumpster fire that is the world right now.