The Good Place on NBC

also: wings

I want to order wings now.

wings are dope

It was a good call.

i don't know about chidi, making him senegalese (?) but coming up with an in-world excuse for playing him as a culturally unmarked american (or i guess, culturally highbrow = cosmopolitan, conventional social identity left behind) plays exactly on the nose for his portrayal of a philosophy professor (seriously, pitch-perfect), but it also sets them up to not have any need to address black identity.

everyone is equal in death

- thomas hobbes

Chidi should speak French in the flashbacks. Where was he supposed to live? It's hard to tell because you get his grown friend, the Australian professor, the English-speaking girlfriend in bed...

we binged the first season in like 2 days - i like it a lot

i think he moved around a lot doing post-docs and shit

I demand more expository rigor from my NBC sitcoms.

yeah, i don't really care. SOME of the animals on earth on Z Nation turn into zombies. but apparently most don't.

Not that it's a life and death matter but I wondered that too about where Chidi was supposed to have actually lived and taught. It makes sense that it would be in an English-speaking First World country but then he could have just given that as his reason for speaking English in ep 1.

I mean, idk, maybe it was at a Senegalese uni where an Australian guy moved to teach and they just translated the flashbacks.

everyone can understand everyone else, in death

like, it's an american TV show so it's finna be in english regardless of where the characters are actually supposed to be from. plus, y'know, they're all dead. so it would make some sort of sense that souls would be able to understand each other in the fantasy, imaginary universe of this afterlife.

idk sounds like a cop-out to avoid addressing the armenian genocide

if they r souls why do they not float thru doors and how do they drink chowder from chowder fountains and are the clams ghosts also, damn this shit is sloppy

That part makes sense and was explicitly stated in the first episode, as far as the afterlife scenes go. It's Chidi's flashbacks (to his Earthbound lifetime) that are more confusing.
2xp

And part of the point was that they did feel the need to explain in ep 1 that Chidi was speaking French but was being translated since it was the afterlife, after Eleanor said "you speak excellent English". If, on Earth, his English was good enough to have lectured on advanced topics, he could have just given that reason. Again, it's little stuff, just thoughts that come up when we're posting on the Internet about a TV show.

How do lava demons even fit into human-sized skin suits, ffs. If they don't address this outrage immediately, I'm out.

so you just want the earthbound parts of show w chidi in french to keep it honest then

I did crack up at the demons out of character in the alleyway hanging out, with one of them in his normal form just chilling

I mean, I was just going off something scott was saying in the first place, but, now that I feel like I need to explain, I just think it's confusing where it was that he was supposed to have been a professor. Around 2:45 into s1e7, you see him on campus talking to his Australian-accented colleague about his boots. Most aspects of the setting of the scene - the somewhat diverse but predominantly white student body, their clothes, the vegetation - make me think of a university campus somewhere in the West. They look like what I see every day, not like any of these pictures: https://www.google.com/search?q=senegal+university+campus&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjyxfHuwtfWAhVEyoMKHa69DMIQ_AUICigB&biw=1173&bih=671

It may well be something that they will explain. A lot of the things that seemed confusing in s1 did end up making sense when the twist came around.

xp

And, like, this wouldn't even be that weird:

so you just want the earthbound parts of show w chidi in french to keep it honest then

Master of None did this with flashbacks to India, for example.

I feel like there was a throwaway line that explained where he was teaching, but maybe not?

<3 sund4r

Master of None was a Netflix series, the rules are going to be different on a network sitcom. The most subtitles on a network show this year probably came in the first Star Trek episode.

Doesn't Chidi run through the whole locations of Universities etc thing when he first meets Eleanor in one of the very early episodes but she fails to listen to anything he says or at least remember it.

I, too, failed to listen

guys this is all covered fully in my fanfic

Oh yeah, "my work took me all over the place: Australia, Hong Kong, Paris." So Eleanor was just being dumb when she commented on his excellent English but I've got that lots of times too.

you misspelled racist :)

i feel like they made jason TOO dumb in the last episode even for him. he was like a dog trapped in a human body. that whole episode was pretty much in one room.

tahani's death was a little too dumb too! disguised as a waiter? really? i kinda hope this show doesn't get too dumb. guess it depends on who is writing the episode.

I kept thinking the most glaring question not asked by characters was 'are there kids in the good place?' or indeed figuring out the real deal based on their absence. Schur's understandable explanation tho - http://www.ibtimes.com/good-place-creator-explains-why-there-are-no-children-elderly-people-shows-afterlife-2477423

I’m only not quite done with this latest episode but... someone just remembered the cocaine. This bodes well.

Oh, never mind

http://www.vulture.com/2017/10/the-good-place-janet-on-the-twist-and-the-audition.html

mindy and janet rule school

So, as hinted, will Season 3 be their attempts to fit into the good Good Place, but finding they brought their hell with them?

otm about the varying quality having to do with writing; the cast always brings it and the concept holds my attention but there are times when the writing feels WAY off

saw that gr80’s buddy (I’m remembering that correctly, right) cord was a story editor on this new one

someone opined that janet is god

i don't think that's quite right, but she's obviously something key

also it'd be funnier if mindy were god

i give this week's episode 12 out of 13

Michael’s slow motion home alone-style freakout

felt like this week (and last week to a degree) were a bit of a dip in quality but I can't tell if that's because I'm watching it week to week ratehr than the entire season in one marathon which is what I did in season 1. maybe season 1 felt that way too if you didn't watch it all at once.

Ha, I thought of Munch's The Scream. (Maybe that's obvious.) xp

guys this is all covered fully in my fanfic

Does it have a lot of butt-touching?

I've been on ILX long enough to know that I don't share its sense of humor, borne out by the fact that I didn't find the first season funny at all but have loled a bunch with season 2.

binge-ketchupping soup-to-nuts this past week i was pleased to be struck by something semi-accurate in the most recent ep, which helped explain why I've found the whole thing excellent fun and formally pretty original, while still somehow naggingly familiar

the insight was this: it's a reboot (for TV series) of BEDAZZLED (1967), starring the late peter cook and the late dudley moore, directed by (the not-yet-late!) stanley donen, and one of my dad's favourite films

follow-up insight: well no, it obviously actually isn't exactly -- but it does share some of its tropes, even if it also mixes them up, viz story is a contest of wits between the (or anyway a) devil (cook/danson) and an ordinary human person (moore/bell) over a sequence of reformulations of post-death scenario, which cook/danson sets up to frustrate and torment moore/bell

• technically moore isn't post-death: he's just bungled his suicide when cook turns up, but he's in the pitilessly escape-free faustian space between bargain (seven wishes in return for soul) and the inevitable closer (you never beat the devil), which is also where bell and her chums are. A kind of furiously malleable limbo
• technically is the one who gets to decide when one of his scenarios ends (he blows a raspberry to end it); danson actually makes the executive decision to end bell’s scenarios (but it’s *always* triggered when bell realises they’re not in the good place, so in a way same difference)
• bell has three unchanging chums; moore only really has one, since his suicide and his wishes are all directed towards his success or failure w.the woman played by eleanor bron (“equator bro” thx spellcheck), who I believe appears in all the seven (or six if you agree with moore’s counting heh) limbo scenarios
• cook is THE devil (= lucifer aka satan mekratrig rather even than lucifuge rofocale, belial, abbadon, sataniacha, ashtoreth, leviathan or whoever) where danson is at best A Minor Not-Very-Senior Devil on probation. But both (as the most recent nextflix ep demonstrates) are thinking of challenging the ancient celestial ruling that has exiled them. Cook has collected a billion souls and is therefore in a position to request his case be reviewed per an informal agreement he apparently made with god; danson is hoping to sneak into the (actual real) good place alongside his four victims, when they make their escape.
• This^^^last was what cause me to make the (not-quite) connection – danson-mikey’s serenely deluded arrogance in re his possible entry int heaven suddenly very much reminded me of cook-lucifer’s

Other points: I find the Tahani character a bit of a slog (partly bcz jameele jamil is inexperienced as an actress and slightly over-signals her character now and then, or at leas did at first; partly bcz the US tin ear for UK culture is often just a bit too BLOOD SAUSAGE). On the other hand I think manny jacinto as jason is terrific and adorable. While I know that how d’arcy carden’s janet comes across is a deliberate part of the show’s joke — i.e. that her flat cheerful biddability is a bit wearing on everyone else — it is also a bit wearing on the viewer (well, this viewer).

Anyway, A+ and A++ since the second series began (when it fully came together, and danson's plastic creepiness suddenly made sense)

s/b jameela sorry