10 Best TV Show Twists You Never Saw Coming
2. They're Actually In The Bad Place - The Good Place
The Good Place's kooky setup involves Eleanor Shellstrop (Kristen Bell) dying and ending up in the seemingly idyllic titular afterlife, but considering she's hardly the sort of savoury, utopia-worthy sort, she soon realises she's been sent to the Good Place by accident.
It seems like a perfectly respectable setup for a few seasons worth of silly shenanigans, but creator Michael Schur violently pulls the rug out from audiences in the first season's thirteenth and final episode, "Michael's Gambit."
The episode reveals that the "Good Place" is actually the Bad Place in disguise, and the various zany mishaps were actually carried out at the behest of their overseer Michael (Ted Danson), who is in fact a demon tasked with torturing them.
All the sitcom-worthy hijinks were really part of a bigger picture reveal, one which made revisiting the first season a real hoot given the many retrospectively blatant clues on offer.
This is a classic example of a show luring the audience into a false sense of security with its frothy presentation, only to deliver something brilliantly subversive totally out of nowhere.