I may have wrapped up Cheers, but I wasn't ready to say good-bye to Ted Danson yet, so I decided I wanted to move on to either Fargo or The Good Place. When I discovered that there is no way to watch Fargo except on Hulu, the decision was made for me and I settled on Michael Schur's NBC comedy.
I'm going to try to go through this without spoilers, which will be difficult as there's no shortage of plot twists along the way, which vary greatly in both intrigue and predictability.
Particularly given that it's in the comedy genre, The Good Place gets extremely high marks for innovation, as the premise is unlike any I've seen before. In the premiere, Eleanor Shellstrop (Kristen Bell) steps into the office of someone named Michael (Danson). Eleanor learns from Michael that she has died and that the afterlife consists of a "Good Place" and a "Bad Place", and that she has wound up in the "Good Place". The system of how the afterlife works is revealed to not be in accordance with any particular religion (according to Michael, each religion only gets it about 5% right or less, but some stoned guy in Canada figured it out with 92% accuracy). Essentially, every action done by a person earns them either positive or negative points, and only the people with the very highest positive scores at the end of their life make it into the Good Place. Some of the best gags on the show include Michael bringing up screens of significant point-earning actions, such as:
- ATE VEGAN: +425.94
- NEVER DISCUSSED VEGANISM UNPROMPTED: +9,875.37
- FAIL TO DISCLOSE CAMEL ILLNESS WHEN SELLING CAMEL: -22.22
- ROOT FOR NEW YORK YANKEES: -99.15 (Schur is a huge Red Sox fan)
The central problem? Later in the pilot episode, Eleanor realizes that they took the wrong person and that she's in the Good Place by mistake. Realizing that she's a less-than-worthy person in a utopian world, she decides to take lessons from her assigned soulmate Chidi (William Jackson Harper), who was an ethics professor in life. Her hope is that she can pass as enough of a good person to survive in the Good Place without being found out as a fraud.
Eleanor and Chidi shortly meet a socialite named Tahani (Jameela Jamil) and a silent Buddhist monk named Jianyu (Manny Jacinto) and the story eventually becomes just as much about each of the other three major players as it is about Eleanor. All of them have unique challenges in adjusting to the new afterlife in the neighborhood that Michael has created for them. Furthermore, things begin to go awry within the fabric of the neighborhood when Eleanor engages in selfish behavior inconsistent with that expected of citizens of the Good Place.
The show effectively utilizes flashbacks to each of these four peoples' lives, and these add a lot of color to what each is all about. Citizens of the Good Place are served by some sort of computerized being called Janet (D'Arcy Carden), who repeatedly insists that she is neither a woman nor a robot. Despite not initially appearing to be a being with human emotion, Janet is developed into someone with almost as much personality as the rest of the gang, and her popping in and startling characters with her trademark, "Hi there" is a wonderful running gag.
The acting in the show is superb -- especially for a comedy. Danson is obviously great, as he might be the greatest sitcom actor of all time. The way Michael reacts with glee to unfamiliar human objects and conventions is delightful. Plus, there's a scene in which he tends bar! If seeing Ted Danson behind a bar doesn't give you all the feels, you've....never seen Cheers, I guess. Still, despite Danson's excellence, Kristen Bell's performance is the best; she slips perfectly into her Eleanor character and captures all the right emotions and quirks of a sorta crappy person trying her damnedest to care about other people and the underlying ethics of the things she does. I found myself saying aloud, "She's so good" many times during our viewing, usually in-between the excellent laughs that the show delivers.
This is pretty bare-bones, as it's really hard to talk at length about The Good Place without this getting spoileriffic. This is the rare comedy that makes you care just as much about the plot as getting a good laugh. I guess that makes sense, given that the stakes for the characters often involve eternal damnation. The ethical dilemmas presented on the show are consistently interesting to think about and really make you ponder both our life and the afterlife at a level deeper than you'd ever think from a network sitcom. It manages to carry that weight despite being consistently funny and charming. You can watch Season One on Netflix and Season Two on NBC's website. I don't know what you're waiting for.
Seasons One & Two Grade: A-
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