Good Place, Great Laughs

You wouldn't think that a series that takes place in heaven could manage to be not only entertaining, but one of the funniest series that NBC has done in quite some time. But that's exactly what you get with The Good Place, a series that may be the funniest show to deal with death since the still incredibly missed Pushing Daisies.

The series takes place around a woman named Eleanor after she died, we learn, being crushed by a parade of shopping carts. She meets a man named Michael, the Architect of The Good Place (Ted Danson, continuing his career renaissance) who tells her that she was a good person, and has come to her specially engineered heaven with 361 other good people in a utopia that looks rather like one of those suburbs that was the founding area for Weeds. It's a nice place, with lots of frozen yogurt stands, an assistant named Janet willing to tell you everything you need to know, and you are paired up with your soulmate. There's just one tiny problem: Eleanor isn't supposed to be here.

Everyone thinks that Eleanor was a human rights activist who worked out of Africa. This Eleanor worked for telemarketing company selling drugs to senior citizens. What is more, when we see flashbacks of her life, it is clear is several small ways as well as big ones, she was a loathsome character.(Because she's played by Kirsten Bell, though, part of us likes her anyway.) This comes as a huge shock to her soulmate Chibi, a professor who spent his life studying ethics. It is also clearly doing something to undermine the sanctity of the Good Place, considering that sinkholes are appearing everywhere, and shrimp are attacking citizen. It is also clear that this was not the only mistake; in the last episode, we learned that one of Eleanor's neighbor, a Tibetan Monk who had taken a vow of silence, was actually Jason Mendoza, a Miami DJ, who wasn't much nicer than Eleanor was. This all becomes much clearer when we learn that this was Michael's first ever job for his 'bosses'. Somehow, it seems fitting that heaven operates much as a bureaucracy as everywhere else.

This is by far one of the most radical ideas for a comedy series, and one could see things going wrong if this confection just touched ground once. Indeed, some of the jokes, like swearing being prohibited (the phrase "What the fork? " comes up repeatedly). What makes the series work well in addition to the situation is that it takes the characters seriously. Eleanor may not want to exposed, but all the flaws in her character on Earth are present here: she seems to despise her neighbor Taheani, who despite the fact she is a charming, good person who deserves to be her, is the kind of woman who would get on your nerves anywhere, especially for eternity. But what she's trying to do is prove that she can fit in here., even though it goes against everything she was on Earth. To meet any person trying to change is a novel concept on TV; to meet on her a comedy is even more remarkable. Add to this all the wonderful throwaway lines about the bad place (every president except Lincoln is there),the delightful human aspects of the eternal, especially the Architect (Ted Danson is playing a likeable character. Who'd have thunk?) It's not clear yet where this will land as a much watched sitcom, but in concept and execution, its one of the more dazzling series so far this year.

My score:4.25 stars.