The Good Place
Eleanor Shellstrop, an ordinary woman who, through an extraordinary string of events, enters the afterlife where she comes to realize that she hasn't been a very good person. With the help of her wise afterlife mentor, she's determined to shed her old way of living and discover the awesome (or at least the pretty good) person within.
CharlesTheBold@CharlesTheBold
The Good Place is a fantasy-comedy that was first broadcast on NBC in the Fall of 2016. Unlike most TV comedies, it is serialized, with a continuing story that flows from one episode to the next. It is filmed without a laugh track.
The show has six characters. Two of them Janet and Michael (Ted Danson), operate a post-mortem world call the Good Place, and the other four, Eleanora (Kristin Bell), Chidi, Tahani, and Jason, are recently deceased humans who are bewildered to find themselves in the place.
I find this a highly original show. It deals with issues rarely seen in TV comedy: death and the afterlife, guilt and responsibility, but does so in highly amusing ways (One running joke is a spell that overrides swear words with innocuous ones like "fork" and "shirt", much to the irritation of characters who really feel a need to sound off). It has a unusually diverse cast, three of the six main characters being Filipino, Asian-Indian, and Senegalese. Since Chidi is a former philosophy professor, it also has an intellectual side as he tries to make sense of his new eternal dwelling place. In contrast to the well-behaved "Good Place", we have frequent farcical flashbacks to the characters' wild former lives, a la "Lost".
For viewers looking for something different, I quite recommend this show.
Sweatpants@Sweatpants
Oddly Refreshing.
rsanek@rsanek
Not bad, but I lost interest about halfway through season two. It felt like the writing quality had taken a dive and they started going for easy/obvious laughs. I am waiting for Kristen Bell to find a show where she does as well as she did in _House of Lies_!