I don’t really watch a lot of live TV. Generally, there’s the various Arrowverse shows I suspect I wouldn’t watch if I didn’t see them live, The Simpsons when a new episode comes along, and until last night, The Good Place. Why that one? Initially, I think it was because, thanks to Netflix, I had finally gotten around to–and quite enjoyed–Parks and Recreation, and that show’s co-creator Michael Schur was the creative force behind a new series about, well, the afterlife. My preference for TV comedy these days is usually something that is a bit unconventional, at least compared to standard TV sitcoms.
No, I still haven’t seen The Office. But I have seen all of The Good Place, and it was very much worth the trip.
The Good Place started with the reawakening of Kristen Bell’s Eleanor Shellstrop. She’s dead, but a kindly fellow named Michael (Ted Danson) is there to tell her everything is OK. She’s in the Good Place. The religions of the world were all wrong. Instead, life is based on a point system. Do a good deed, and you earn some points. Do something else and you lose points. Get enough points and you go to the Good Place, but fall short and you go to the Bad Place. In short order, Eleanor is introduced to Chidi Anagonye (William Jackson Harper), a man she is told is her soulmate, neighbors Tahani (Jameela Jamil) and Jianyu (Manny Jacinto), and the afterlife’s somewhat living version of Siri, Janet (D’Arcy Carden). There’s just one problem for Eleanor: she’s not supposed to be in the Good Place. The life described to her was not her own. She should have gone to the Bad Place to be horribly tortured for all eternity. Will Chidi, an ethics professor in life, teach her to be a better person before she’s found out?
Such is the initial basic premise of the show, but the thing of it is, The Good Place never really stayed in one spot for very long. This was a show with a lot of plot twists, such that I don’t really want to bring any of them up here. Much of the delight of The Good Place comes from not only being continually surprised by a new twist, but seeing how the characters react to them. And these are the sorts of people that it would be easy to spend time with. Eleanor, a self-described human garbage bag, really does have a long way to go to maybe become a better person, and since a quirk of the Good Place is an inability to swear, Bell’s verbal linguistics with the replacement works is rather impressive. Jamil as the overachieving Tahani has that right aura of class and self-indulgent superiority. And Jacinto found an interesting way to play his character’s archetype.
That said, special kudos should go to Carden for playing a multi-purpose character with almost unfailing helpfulness, and that’s when she’s not playing a different Janet (Bad Janet, for example, is everything Good Janet is not). Harper, someone I’d never seen before, has great comic timing as well as being able to be something like the heart of the group. And old pro Danson has a lot of genuine warmth that comes through with every well-timed smile.
What The Good Place all comes down to, in the end, is that we should just be better to each other, and the way to do that is by working together to make us so. The characters of The Good Place grew thanks to their own efforts, working together to make themselves better, and that was something of a message. If we want to live in a good place, then we need to work together to make it. Maybe that isn’t the most revolutionary of morals, but at least the trip there was very much worth it.
Grade: A+
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