The
Good Place was one of the more entertaining comedies to come out last
season, and then, in the final minutes of the season finale, we got a
game-changer that even the most daring dramas wouldn't try. The Good Place was
actually a segment of The Bad Place, and Michael, the Architect (I should've
known you can't trust Ted Danson anymore) has actually designed specifically to
torture the four main characters who clearly didn't belong: Eleanor, the
loathsome, self-centered woman; Chidi, the ethics professor who was terminally
indecisive; Jason, a Miami DJ who reached a new level of moronic, and Tahani,
who seemed charming most of the program was actually inferior to everything she
tried to do. The moment all of them figured this out, Michael had their
memories erased, and brought them all back to the beginning to try and perfect
his new form of torment.
But Michael's in more trouble than
he cares to admit. As was also revealed in the Season 1 finale, this project
was considered a bad idea by his superiors, and now, if it fails this time, he
is going to be 'retired' with extreme prejudice. (And having gotten a hint as
to what The Bad Place does for 'fun', its probably going to be eternally
painful.) And now that its been revealed that everyone else in The Good Place
was actually playing a part, they are not wild about having to be recast, and
most of them just want to go back to their old way of torturing people. Add to
this the fact that at the last moment Eleanor (Kirsten Bell) managed to find a
way to begin the search for Chidi again, and its small wonder that the moment
every restarted, it very quickly got all forked up. The Season 2 premiere
highlighted all four of the lead characters perspectives as they rebooted, and
while things mostly started out as worse before, it became very clear that
Michael had underestimated his subjects ability to reason, and overestimated
his actors abilities to stick to the script. By the time the premiere was over,
Michael had managed to regain control, and once against rebooted the process.
What he hasn't told anybody is the fact that his superiors don't know about it,
and that they have no intention of giving him a third chance.
The
Good Place is now trying to do something you wouldn't see on a streaming
drama, much less a network comedy: completely flip the script. Even though
showrunner Michael Schur had this in mind from the moment the series premiered,
it remains to be seen whether this process will end up playing nearly as well
as the fish-out-of-water segment that made Season 1 work so well. What is clear
is that we are watching everybody with new eyes, and Danson, in particular, is
more than up to the challenge. In Season 1, he played Michael as a genial,
bewildered bureaucrat; now, he's playing him as a man who is trying to spin far
too many plates at once, and not doing a good job. We now look at every that is
being done differently, particularly to the idea of what was considered
"good"; in season 1, it was frozen yogurt and portraits of clowns,
now its Hawaiian pizza. But all of the characters are still as engaging as they
were last season, and if anything, they are now more sympathetic, considering
where they are. All of these characters were hard to fathom, but none of them
deserve to be where they are right now.
Will Eleanor and her friends figure
out what is going wrong here? Will the
series make us feel sympathy for Michael again? And is there an actual good
place that these people can get away from? None of these questions have clear
answers, but I have confidence in the writers, enough to agree with the series
opening catchphrase: "Everything is Fine."
My score: 4 stars.
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