The Good Place on NBC

one of the things i really (disproportionately) love about this show is the way janet appears and disappears. they have a cgi budget, they could magic her in and out of frame with some crazy wonky effect, but they chose to use jump cuts instead. it fits so much better with the show's pacing and comedy timing.

didn't catch season 2 opener yet but this is like, the best normal network comedy on tv in years. i watched all of season 1 in one go, which never happens.

janet is so good

I read some info about the s1 finale and thought "this sounds super interesting, let me watch it" and put it on in the living room while my wife (who does not follow tv crit at all) was wrangling our kids.

Five minutes into the pilot, when Eleanor is looking at the clown paintings in her house, my wife looks up and says, "Oh I get it, she's in Hell."

(I lolled.)

I also binged the entire season over the course of this week.

Fantastic show, and I'm very, very glad that the non-Bell/Danson cast is getting and producing work this good.

Love this show, every part of it is great.

Janet happily explaining how she's not a person gets me every time.

I can say without hyperbole that it is my favorite comedy discovery in a long, long while.

I just read that no one in the cast outside of Danson and Bell knew what the reveal was until after it was shot; apparently the two of them knew the entire season, but they kept it from the rest of the cast

Ted Danson laugh after being found out is all time.

it's simple, it's not even a joke, but every single time i love janet's (puzzled) you want me to do what? (beaming) okay!

Ugh, week to week sucks.

i love real eleanor / denise

i love janet

janet is spectacular

Penis flattener

i want to talk about specific janet moments in series 1 but i don't think enough people here have seen it all the way through

Butthole spiders

janet with the potted cactus plants last season made me lol SO MUCH

i love chidi

also every detail about anthony's irl life is so beautifully, majestically dumb & perfect.

http://68.media.tumblr.com/f984d7637accc881706e531c45fdbd48/tumblr_okh55n69AT1teep5ro5_250.gif

double ep was v enjoyable

god this show is such a delight

yessssss the whole cactus thing

wow i have to watch all this again

i want to talk about specific janet moments in series 1 but i don't think enough people here have seen it all the way through

I always thought that the etiquette for specific show threads was that it was fine to talk about anything that has been broadcast already.

oh cool, because i want to talk about the whole arc where she and jason got married and she proclaimed love and interest for him in the most detached and mechanical and brutally honest way possible, but he bought it because he's jason

and the cactus thing

I feel like even after just one season a character poll would be impossible

Shout out to "real Eleanor" though

if michael was all-knowing AND had watched every episode like he said then he would know that the apartment belonged to monica's grandmother and that it was rent-controlled.

look everyone loves janet, but i love the turn they're doing with "real eleanor" from being perfect in s1 to being an annoying diva in s2.
they're taking a big risk with s2 though, how it's basically incomprehensible without having watched all of s1. sitcoms usually encourage people to drop in on any episode.

would totally watch Good Janet/Bad Janet spin-off.

"they're taking a big risk with s2 though, how it's basically incomprehensible without having watched all of s1"

is anything really a risk anymore when you've got the binge dollars coming in? it's on netflix and hulu. and probably amazon and wherever else.

i wonder how much a network makes letting netflix show their show.

michael is clearly not all-knowing

GF noted how nice it is to be gently lowered back into reality after Twin Peaks via The Good Place

michael is clearly not all-knowing

honestly this is the only aspect of the show's world that bugs me, like people can have private conversations that the architects can't see or hear? this is a tiny quibble, though.

I interpret this as Michael not having been given the resources to properly monitor everyone, because he's working on a project his supervisors don't approve of, even though if it's successful it will really help the organization -- when everyone is torturing him or herself, you don't need such a huge staff.

"when everyone is torturing him or herself, you don't need such a huge staff."

uh, except for the town of people who are in on it? that's a lot of overtime.

That's just for now, though. Initial outlay to get the project up and running.

honestly this is the only aspect of the show's world that bugs me

Well, they keep suggesting that Michael is actually terrible at his job, so that's seems like a good enough explanation.

My guess is that the season will work towards the gang and Michael teaming up against the larger aggressor (being Holt's husband from Brooklyn 99).

There is a typically TV critic indulgent thread on Twitter at the moment - they've decided it's a TV show about storytelling and other TV shows. I get the inclination but that is a godawful boring take on it.

i'm rewatching on netflix and it definitely works better as a binge. a chapter a week is fine but less satisfying.

Michael isn't supposed to be omniscient - he's the guy setting up the Sims world and letting it run.

they've decided it's a TV show about storytelling and other TV shows. I get the inclination but that is a godawful boring take on it.

"Area stoner thinks everyone on TV also stoned."

That speech Michael gave to his minions was all-time! “Sure, we could fire up the penis-flattener...”

Just blew through the entire series this weekend. I paid no attention to the episode count so I was shocked when I realized the first season was over.

Not much to say that hasn't already been said. It's great, and I wish I hadn't sat on it for so long. Recognizing glimmers of oneself in the main characters is kind of a 'fun' game (the familiarity of Eleanor's relationship with her coworkers stung a bit).

DJP spoiled this for me on Twitter
is it still worth watching?

Yes

for janet alone, yes

I spoiled myself by peeking at this thread. The impact was lessened slightly but the twist almost seems to be the jumping-off point of the series rather than a Shyamalan-esque 'DID I BLOW YOUR MIND?!?' moment. So, yeah, definitely worth watching.

yeah, and upon rewatching the whole first series takes on a whole new tone

Main cast aside (all excellent), it's lovely to be reminded how amazing Adam Scott is at playing a total douche. He has such a range, that one.

That's really his best mode

haha!
next season, Nick Offerman's "The Wood Place" where he's tormented by sub-par furniture

irl lol

lmao

lmbo kinder

wood watch

I admit my attention wandered a lot during the finale, it wasn't bad but felt like a lot of foregone conclusions.

also thought it was weird that at no point did the show explicitly acknowledge it's thematic undperinnings: transition from standard Western theology of the afterlife (heaven/hell) to an Eastern one (reincarnation/wheel of karma). I mean the final door, for ex, was obviously the achievement of nirvana/stepping off the wheel of karma and reincarnation and yet... no one mentioned it.

Chidi did make a comment to the effect that "for spiritual questions, you need to look to the East" and cited a Buddhist conception of death as a wave rejoining the ocean.

There was something unsatisfying about it for me too, though.

Christian theology and Western ethical theories worked for a simpler world but life on Earth has become so complex that reincarnation and karma is all that works now?

Lol @ The Wood Place btw.

given where they went with it, i was a little disappointed that the door didn't let worthy spirits who felt complete back to the world to help the rest of us get it right i.e. good place buddhism didn't find a mahāyāna expression

Also jason spent 1000s of Jeremy Berimies ‘like a monk’ before going through the door with Chidi.

I wish they hadn't felt the need to underline that with the dialogue tbh

I noticed that too - but the thing is those are, at best tangential asides. At no point does Chidi (or anybody) say anything along the lines of "huh, maybe Saint Augustine was wrong and D.T. Suzuki was right!", not even when they were "designing" the new afterlife.

xps

Has it ever been that heavy handed? As Chidi got more sure of his own moral philosophy he referenced people less and less. Surely his ‘enlightenment’ would transcend all earthly philosophies and wouldn’t need the references and we wouldn’t comprehend it anyway.

It was kind of there in the first episode, everyone got the afterlife a bit right and it was Doug Fourcet who got it e most right (17% IIRC).

St. Augustine is referenced in the final episode!

Just finished. I really liked it and the only thing that bothered me was being confused about Tahani's parents inexplicably being loving. We guffawed at the "keep it sleazy" because it was so unexpected and Danson sold it.

The couplings never bothered me; I actually may have liked them because they seemed pretty simple and straightforward.

I kind of thought they subtly underlined the wave/water/rejoining the earth thing with the little light dropping to Michael's storyline after eleanor walks through the door? I think it's nice to have more entertainment that isn't about fear of death and the unknown (like Coco).

being confused about Tahani's parents inexplicably being loving

well they had gone through the process already of becoming better people in purgatory

the only thing that bothered me was being confused about Tahani's parents inexplicably being loving

The idea is that by the time they finally "make it" to the actual Good Place to reunite with Tahani, they've been reset countless times until they've finally truly corrected their personal defects. (xp!)

but Tahani and her sister were also surprised!

I kind of can't keep the episodes in the last season straight and have a feeling I may have missed one.

I think it's nice to have more entertainment that isn't about fear of death and the unknown (like Coco).

?! Man I thought Coco was incredible.

I read that as a compliment to Coco actually.

oh yeah, I was wondering what the ? was for. Coco and The Good Place don't treat death as a horrifying, fearful event.

sorry, my bad, I misunderstood

If you could push a button and simply cease to exist, would you press it?

This was great when it remembered it could be sad *and* funny at the same time (Chidi’s calendar!) but I still kind of preferred the earlier, funnier, smarter ones

A treat to get 4 seasons of Ted Danson doing this, though (even if evil Ted was better). WJH seemed v poorly served by this season, mind

What’s Ted danson doing next?

Still bummed by the oh so short run of Bored to death. George is probably my favourite character he’s played.

Love that show

What’s Ted danson doing next?

Tina Fey & Robert Carlock sold a direct-to-series project to NBC about Jack Donaghy running for mayor of NYC. Alec Baldwin spent a year on his usual hardball negotiating in the style that got 30 Rock cancelled mid-season, and now the series will star Danson as a businessman running for mayor of LA.

Agree that Bored To Death is apex Danson.

The republican convention moving to Jacksonville made me want to bump this thread

pic.twitter.com/67GErFIWyK

— no context the good place (@nocontexttgp) March 1, 2019

Just started watching this show, incredibly relieved when at the end of episode 3 that the Buddhist monk actually got to speak. Was totally afraid that character would just be a running joke.

it gets even better!

that character becomes, shall we say, somewhat integral to the story

honestly one of the all-time great performances

K i'm just starting the third season and am just completely amazed by this show
that it exists at all (I imagine pitched as Lost: The Sitcom!) and on was on network television, that it gets rebooted effectively every year, and that it's so awesome and the cast is so so good

it's a very good show!
without being a killjoy, allow me to forewarn that i don't think it sticks the landing and gets mired down in its own sentimentality too much for its own good. that said, i watched it weekly and didn't binge so i'm curious what your take is.

Loved this show massively!

I can easily understand how you felt though - if i had to watch this show week to week ala... well, Lost, it could've driven me crazy, especially the last two seasons having the Batman '66-esque cliffhangers for several episodes in a row to end them all. The last season I really kept wondering how the show wasn't ending from like, episode 8 of 13 onward. But it's perfect as a binging show and provided some desperately needed positive vibes for me in this time. (Next up: Ted Lasso.)

Yes the show gets REALLY sentimental, but I was totally okay with it honestly. I wholeheartedly bought into the show's concept - as lampshaded clearly in one of the final episodes - that for all this thought about philosophy and what good and bad people deserve in the afterlife, without that emotional underpinning it would've rung much more hollow. (And just as importantly, as a sitcom, it hit on a pretty much every level - the characters, cast, absurdism, etc. all worked and the show didn't go on past its welcome.) Ultimately, I bought in.

Still feeling a little wistful sadness from the finale, but ultimately very happy to go through all those Jeremy Berimys. Gonna skim through this thread to see how people felt in real time...

JORTLES

all seems fair on that assessment

Former Jacksonville Jaguars QB Blake Bortles says he 'quietly' retired

should've announced it by throwing a molotov cocktail at a boat