The Good Place - Season 1 (2016)

When I first heard about The Good Place, it sounded like a neat little idea: one of the brains behind Parks and Recreation and The Office, the afterlife, Ted Danson, and Kristen Bell. It appeared to be a slightly quirky but still conventional take on the single-camera sitcom, and I knew at some point I would need to watch it.

Oh, how wrong I was. The Good Place in its first season has become one of the best sitcoms currently on television. With its clever, witty writing and excellent performances, The Good Place is poised to become one of the best places to turn your attention to on Thursday nights.

Part of this is because of its premise. Kristen Bell plays Eleanor, a recently-deceased woman who sees herself put in “the Good Place” in the afterlife. What’s off about this, you ask? It’s simple: there’s no way she belongs there. By any stretch of the imagination, Eleanor is at best an average person who compares extremely unfavorably to the philanthropists, environmentalists, and ethics professors. She quickly realizes that she has been mistaken for another Eleanor who died at the exact same moment she did through seeing “her memories” that consist of her being a death row lawyer who has saved dozens of people from execution. The first season of The Good Place consists mostly of her trying to become a better person with the help of lessons from Chidi, the aforementioned ethics professor.

There’s a lot to like about the premise of the show, which lends a lot to the show’s clever writing, but the characters and the actors portraying them are the real reason to watch. Kristen Bell does a great job playing the wolf-in-sheep’s-clothing of Eleanor, allowing her conflict to show surprisingly well for her being in a sitcom. Ted Danson of Cheers fame turns in an excellent performance as Michael, the architect of this particular neighborhood of the Good Place, balancing whimsical and uncertain, as the neighborhood begins to become unstable because of Eleanor’s actions. One of the most hilarious characters in the entire show is D’Arcy Carden’s Janet, an intelligent personal assistant in a human body. The writing for her is stellar, but Carden’s deadpan, nearly robotic mannerisms make it work perfectly.

Part of the problem with me talking about The Good Place is that the first season ends with a major plot twist that greatly impacts the way the show is laid out. I’m not going to spoil it for you, but I will say that it turns the entirety of the show’s narrative on its head and that it works extremely well. The second season (or the few episodes that have aired so far) definitely show a lot of potential with how they are handling this extreme shift, but in the first season it makes everything actually make a whole lot of sense. It is an extremely well-handled plot twist that has already paid off in a huge way and made the show tremendously better in its second season. (Hopefully, Schur and his team of writers don’t get too twist-happy in the show’s future: while I love a good plot twist, when they become expected they lose their potency.)

That’s not to say The Good Place isn’t a good show in its first season: on the contrary, it is definitely in the upper tier of sitcoms on television today. It has good performances, great comedic writing, and a fantastic premise and premise-ending twist that only looks to get even better developed in the show’s second season (and hopefully beyond). I have no doubt it’s going to become the next great sitcom if it continues to get better and better as it has already.

My recommendation: Definitely watch it.

My grade: 83

Where to find it: Netflix for the first season, NBC on Thursday nights at 8:30/7:30c for the second