The Good Place: Review

Everything is fine!

It's a nice sentiment that greets Eleanor Shellstrop on her first day in the afterlife and one that I'd pretty much attributed to this series for its first season.

"It's fine" nothing spectacular, nothing to write home about, and THEN things got interesting!

I've always at least got one show on the go which I binge by myself. It's usually a sitcom, something light and dumb that I can enjoy without thinking too hard or, more commonly, without thinking at all.

I assumed that The Good Place was going to fill that hole pretty nicely but the more I watched the more I realised that I could not turn off my brain for this. This required my attention and surprisingly I didn't mind at all.

During this time when everyone is looking for something uplifting you'd have thought that a show about a group of dead people being judged by immortal beings for their actions on Earth might not be the way to go but I would argue that The Good Place is the perfect sitcom for these difficult times and a brilliant one to binge if you're wondering what to add next to your Netflix que.

The Good Place is about Eleanor Shellstrop, a girl from Arizona who wakes up to find that she's dead. Luckily she led such an extraordinary life on Earth that she made it to The Good Place, a perfect paradise designed to cater to her every whim by an afterlife architect called Michael.

However, Eleanor is actually selfish, mean and resentful and hasn't done any of the extraordinary things everyone thinks she has. She isn't meant to be here. The Good Place made a mistake.

Determined not to get caught and sent to The Bad Place, Eleanor teams up with her assigned soulmate Chidi, a philosophy professor who tries to teach her how to be a good person but with The Good Place breaking around her staying inconspicuous might be a bigger challenge than she thought.

Over the four seasons this show just seems to get better. Like all good sitcoms it's infuriatingly addictive with episode cliffhangers that make it impossible to leave the next episode alone.

While it might not be as laugh out loud funny as other shows like Community or Parks and Recreation, The Good Place makes up for it with a cast of brilliantly drawn characters that you instantly connect with and relate to.

The insane situations they find themselves in stretch the genre in new ways. Every episode the show gets increasingly creative with it's stories and the moral conundrums it creates for its characters.

Add a large helping of good old fashioned silliness and you've got yourself an extremely clever, entertaining show.

The philosophical element to the show is something that most prime time sitcoms wouldn't even dare go near, nevermind base their entire show on!

It's really hard to talk about this show without spoiling everything which is why this review is as short as it is. One thing that I would say is it's been a long time since I've seen character arcs done this well. While each of the characters are given fairly simple traits, the way they evolve over the course of four seasons is handled perfectly leading to what is probably my favourite sitcom ending of all time. Then again that bar really isn't very high.

Enough laughs, creative set-ups and pathos to last at least two full watches, this is definitely one I'll be re-visiting while the world is a little mad.

8/10