The Good Place star reveals how he changes a sitcom stereotype from Friends and others through his own character

Manny Jacinto's Jason Mendoza on The Good Place is one of the greatest 'doofus' characters in sitcom television history, and it turns out the actor worked really hard on making sure that the "idiot" trope did not wash out his character.

In a recent conversation with Screen Rant during the Denver Fan Expo, Jacinto talks about the measures he took to ensure that his character would not fall into the annoying doofus territory and stick solely to lovable doofus.

Jason Mendoza is universally accepted as one of the most lovable characters on The Good Place. Jacinto's portrayal of Jason elevated the character to a layered depiction. Even though a lot of this has to do with the brilliant writing for the show, there's a lot to be said about Jacinto as well.

Manny Jacinto talks about his efforts to overturn stereotypes with Jason Mendoza in The Good Place

The "idiot" archetype on a sitcom is generally a character who lives their life in a constant state of optimism, away from any and all limitations generally imposed by reality. Characters like Joey from Friends or Rose Nylund from The Golden Girls would fall under this category. Nothing can keep them down for long, but the thing about this archetype is that it is not easy to bring it to life.

There's a very thin line for the idiocy to go from charming to annoying, something Jacinto explains well when talking about his character on The Good Place:

"There’s so many dummy roles onscreen, and luckily I’m a huge fan of comedies. I go to Friends, so you’ve got Joey from Friends. And you’ve got Andy on Parks and Rec. He’s a dummy. You have, um, you have just so many archetypes, and it’s so hard to play that role because you get annoying really, really fast."

Jason Mendoza from The Good Place is not the first lovable doofus that Michael Schur has created; Andy Dwyer has that role booked, but Mendoza is one of Schur's best.

Much of this is because even though he is incredibly stupid and woefully unaware of reality—where you can't just throw a Molotov cocktail at your problems (BORTLES!)—the way Jacinto portrays Mendoza is with extreme empathy, warmth, innocence, and emotional intelligence.

This leads to even the stupidest things being funny when he's the one saying them, and the occasional logic from him appears to be almost accidental. As Jacinto explains about Mendoza in The Good Place:

"So then the door that I was able to walk through was just finding his emotional intelligence because if he’s not intelligent as a person, he has to have some sort of intelligence to be able to be redeeming. And it just came down to him being like a five year old. Like your eyes are just wide with pure imagination. You want to please the people that are around you. But with that, you have some pretty dumb decisions."

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