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It seems we're talking a bit past one another. I'm not really talking about episodic fillers, though of course those can also be a problem. To me the entire premise of the third and fourth season felt tacked on in the typical style of how tv shows always have to expand the scope from personal adventures to grand, world-saving heroism when they run out of interesting small-scope ideas.
To elaborate a bit (spoiler, obviously): The original premise of the first season was about how the four thought they were sent mistakenly to heaven, but actually it's hell and they're instead supposed to be mentally torturing each other. Then we also find out in the second season that despite getting rebooted over and over, they always find out the truth and in addition, they actually become better people. They then appeal their case to a judge. And ... that's actually already a good story. Imo they should have simply gotten into limbo or maybe even heaven, that's it, with the implication that appeals along these lines are already not terribly uncommon. But finding out that nobody has been to heaven in ages due to an extremely simplistic, stupid point systems was not only completely unnecessary to the original idea, from the start it was imo a bad and rather arrogant premise. This is compounded by how it's solved by exactly those four humans who originally were extremely vapid and self-involved. Them eventually improving to a point that they don't belong into hell anymore is a nice idea; Turning them into moral geniuses that re-design the entire system is, again, stupid and arrogant. The ending of "heaven gets boring, so suicide" is also, again, unnecessary to THAT premise.
Otherwise, I unsurprisingly strongly agree with your earlier post. I'm a solidly in the technofuturist transhumanist "good-things-are-good" camp, and I have nothing but scorn for the showrunner's values. But even independent of that, I think that just keeping the story tightly focused on the original premise would have been much better. If anything, I'd have preferred a few seasons of episodic hijinks along that line to the ever-increasing scope we got instead.
I think I understand you now. You didn't sell me on "tacked on", though - IMHO as long as stakes are raised steadily that's just a common way of writing in general, not a failing and not specific to TV shows. There are a lot of ways to do it wrong (writers who rely on expanding scope because that's the only way they can raise interest, writers who run out of interesting grand-scope ideas too and then end up with an anticlimax or with no sense of stakes, writers who can't or don't bother to come up with convincing Watsonian reasons for the higher stakes and for their particular protagonists to be critical to them...) but I don't think the writers here made any of the typical errors; I think we just have a difference of taste here. You might be right that following your tastes would have led to a better result overall, or even to a result that I'd think was better.
You definitely did sell me on "arrogant", butany kind of "here's how heaven works" worldbuilding pretty much has to be that.
I thought they were somewhat humble about parts of the expanded premise, given their milieu.
And I stand firm on the idea that, despite the arrogance, the fatal flaw here was that the writers weren't brave enough to be arrogant enough:
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