To say that a show like "The Good Place" (created by former "Parks and Recreation" creator Mike Schur) is built on an abstract idea, is a bit of an understatement. The show, tells the story of Eleanor (the always funny Kristen Bell) who dies and accidentally winds up in "The Good Place" after having spent her life being a pretty terrible person. How did she wind up here? Michael (Ted Danson doing some great physical comedy) is some sort of eternal entity taking his first crack at creating his very own community in the Good Place, and has mistaken Eleanor for a lawyer who helped innocent people get off of death row. Realizing his mistake, Eleanor is desperate to avoid being found out as a fraud and sent to "The Bad Place," despite her inherent tendency to make selfish choices. It's a solid premise that presents a lot of opportunities for funny and inventive stories, but it also requires an exhaustive amount of exposition. The result was a series premiere that felt like it had a lot of potential to be something great, but also felt pretty bogged down by all of the explaining it had to do.
It's hard to call the exposition done in these first two episodes a flaw, because it's all very necessary. These episodes had to explain what "The Good Place" is, how a person winds up either there or in "The Bad Place" (it's based on a point system that evaluates everything you ever did while alive), and how Eleanor can have any hope of staying in "The Good Place," when she is clearly a pretty bad person. The answer to that last plot issue is Eleanor's afterlife soulmate (In "The Good Place" every person is paired with their perfect soul-mate, even though the pairings don't always seem very perfect) Chidi (William Jackson Harper), who was a professor of ethics during his life on earth. Chidi is reluctant to be an accomplice to Eleanor's fraud, and the way that he won't let Eleanor off the hook for her bad behavior creates a strong comedic dynamic between the two characters. A lot of credit in these first two episode is owed to William Jackson Harper who proves to be a strong comedic foil for Kristen Bell.
Along the way, the show introduces some key supporting characters that currently feel more like caricatures than people. Ted Danson's Michael is the most developed of the supporting characters so far. His always optimistic attitude can be played for great laughs, but Danson also shows that there a cracks in Michael's happy exterior (such as the scene where Michael kicks a small dog into the Sun because he mistakenly thinks it is a glitch in his "perfect" community). D'Arcy Carden plays Janet, a sort of Google search bar AI who appears as a human. Janet provides a lot of funny moments, but as of now lacks depth. Tahani (Jameela Jamil) and Jianyu (Manny Jacinto) are Eleanor's soul-mate neighbors. Tahani is set up as Eleanor's sort of rival, whose actions are nearly perfect but whose attitude is incredibly smug. It's a broad character that we've seen before, but I have hope the show can turn it into something interesting. Jianyu is a former Buddhist monk who has taken a vow of silence which he is continuing even in the afterlife. Mostly this gimmick plays as a punchline to the fact that Tahani talks all the time, and it drives her nuts that Jianyu won't say a word back to her. It's a joke with a short shelf life, but the relationship could be rewarding if the show chooses to explore it further.
That about describes my overall view of the show after these first two episodes. None of it is quite where it needs to be yet, but just about everything in these episodes suggest the show could go in a lot of very fun and interesting directions. Schur's former show "Parks and Recreation" is a classic example of a show that needed time to grow, and it eventually became one of TV's all time great comedies. Will that happen with "The Good Place"? I don't know, but these two episodes were arguably more polished and self aware that the entire first season of "Parks and Recreation," so it's definitely a possibility. Either way, I can definitely see myself sticking with this one for a while.
No comments:
Post a Comment