God Friended Me creators had to "get crafty" in cobbling together a series finale after coronavirus shutdown

Deadline

"I feel relieved that we have an ending that we feel is satisfactory," says co-creator Bryan Wynbrandt of Sunday's series finale. "We were in New York directing this episode and had to pull the plug and we had no real idea if we were going to get to finish. Then a couple of weeks ago, conversations with Warner Bros and CBS started to lean towards us not getting a renewal so Steven and I crafted a plan to finish the finale. We’d only filmed five days so we had to get crafty and pull footage from previous episodes. The fact that we were able to pull it off was a pretty monumental thing and we’re pretty proud of it." Fellow co-creator Steven Lilien adds "When we were in New York we didn’t know at the time that the show was going to be over, all we knew what was going on in the world with the virus so once it became clear that we were going to have to shut down, we still had a few days left to shoot. It wasn’t until we were looking at the footage and knew we weren’t going to go back anytime soon, that we started to hear that the show might not come back. That’s when we started to look and ask ‘how much material do we have’ so that we could end it satisfactorily on an emotional level. Thankfully, the stuff at the end with the mountaintop, we filmed that for the pilot but we never used. We were toying with it being a flash forward."