In The Good Place, Michael's plan to torture the humans in a fake Good Place kept going wrong, but he might have been sabotaging it on purpose. Ambitious and evil, the Bad Place architect was eager to prove that he had found a new way to create miserable eternities for people who failed to gather enough "good" points while on Earth. He did this by making a fake Good Place with the expectation that the evil humans would torture each other. Of course, this plan always went wrong in the same way, which potentially indicates that Michael was not as dedicated to torture as he seemed.
The first time Eleanor realized that she was really in the Bad Place in The Good Place was when she, Chidi, Tahani, and Jason were all arguing among themselves to decide who did not deserve to be there. The miserable bickering helped her work out that she and the others had been unhappy from the moment they arrived in what was supposed to be heaven. Frustrated, Michael rebooted his experiment again and again, but Eleanor always managed to realize she wasn't really in paradise. Weirdly, the demon did not seem to learn his lesson, and continued to make the same mistakes.
Michael's Good Place Experiment Always Failed For The Same Reason
Whenever Michael rebooted his experiment in The Good Place, he always pushed his victims in the same direction. Eleanor would be subtly made aware that she did not deserve to be located in the Good Place, and the knowledge of this would place Chidi in an uncomfortable moral dilemma. Tahani would be made to feel inadequate while also acting superior to people like Eleanor, and Jason would aggravate everyone with either his silence or stupidity. Then, Michael would force them to make ethical decisions, such as choosing someone to voluntarily go to the Bad Place.
This ethical dilemma would always make Eleanor figure out what Michael was up to in The Good Place, which begs the question of why Michael continued to use this same course of action. He claimed to expect this plan to work for 1,000 years, but that could never happen if he forced the group to confront their morality after less than a year. It could be that Michael continued to push his experiment in this direction because he secretly wanted the test subjects to figure it out, since a part of him could see that they were improving.
Michael Always Pushed Eleanor To Be Better In The Good Place (Even Though It Ruined His Plans)
Eleanor did not deserve to be in the real Good Place when she first arrived in Michael's experiment. However, after spending around 300 years being rebooted in The Good Place, she began to improve morally. She might not have remembered everything that happened to her, but the "little voice" that told her right from wrong became stronger and stronger nonetheless. This was entirely thanks to Michael's experiment. He constantly forced Eleanor into making difficult ethical decisions, and she learned from every one of them.
This was all supposedly an accident on Michael's part, of course, but that might not have been the case. Michael had been torturing humans like Eleanor and Chidi the traditional way since the dawn of the universe, but something inspired him to try something different. Michael might not have known that forcing humans to torture each other would make them better, but once it started to happen, he may have been too intrigued to stop. The Good Place revealed Michael to be astute and curious, so instead of correcting the issues that led Eleanor to improve, he repeated them intentionally.
The Good Place Proved Michael Wasn’t Inherently Evil
Michael's intentions started out evil in The Good Place, but just like his test subjects, he began to improve. It became clear that demons were taught to believe that humans deserved punishment, especially those sent to the Bad Place. However, as Michael spent time with Eleanor, Chidi, Tahani, and Jason, he began recognizing that they were not what he expected. This was especially true as they continued to sabotage his experiment by making ethically sound decisions, like when Eleanor turned herself in during The Good Place season 1.
Ultimately, Michael's ability to recognize this and improve himself demonstrated that the "demons" of The Good Place were not inherently evil. Michael may not have immediately realized that he was sabotaging his own experiment and causing the humans to become better versions of themselves. Once he did, however, he committed to it wholeheartedly. In the end, he pointed out the flaws in the system, and his experiment became the foundation for the new afterworld system in The Good Place. Accidentally on purpose, Michael fixed the universe.