Character

Chidi Anagonye

Chidi Anagonye in The Good Place (2016), played by William Jackson Harper.

Chidi is a moral philosophy professor who wakes up dead in what he's told is the afterlife's reward zone, paired with a woman who very much does not belong there. He wants, more than anything, to do the right thing — and his agonizing inability to decide what that is defines every choice he makes.

The joke is that a man who has spent his life studying ethics is the least equipped person to act on them, and William Jackson Harper plays that paralysis as physical comedy — stomachaches, spirals, flop sweat — without ever making Chidi seem foolish. His decency is real even when his indecision is unbearable, and that tension is the show's whole engine.

Played by

Appears in

The Good Place2016