The Good Place on NBC

I think it's that Jason's character might come close to being actually intellectually disabled at times but it is always played for laughs

That's a bit heavy! I thought the character was a parody of a lamebro Youtuber / Viner type

Tracer: whoa!

The Jason character seems more culturally dumb to me than mentally challenged? I’ve known people who were actually book smart who come off more naive. I think he’s just... from Florida.

jameela and kristin bell are two of the most beautiful people on television, but I kind of like that the show doesn't really play up their beauty

Chidi is a well known NY stage actor

as soon as I read that, my first thought was "so what L&O episode was he on?"

one way back in 2010, looks like

lol

"Chidi is a well known NY stage actor"

which kinda means unknown. in t.v. terms.

i just think it's cool that they are not people who have been in 10 different awful people sitcoms.

I get a little bit of cognitive dissonance watching this show and realizing that Eleanor and Chidi, or at least the actors playing them, are my age. At least I'm not in hell.... I think.

xp he was also in High Maintenance!

I have to agree that people who regularly do (or have done) stage work are better at actual acting. Or at least I hold to that bias.

I liked him in Paterson too.

one more slightly dim filipino-american bro on a lighthearted-look-at-existential-dilemmas-focused primetime show and we'll officially have a trend (see also josh chan on CRAZY EX-GIRLFRIEND)

I like The Good Place a lot more as a show but tbf, at least in Crazy Ex-Gf, you also saw Josh's family (incl e.g. a doctor father iirc) and friends (incl a Filipino-American priest). But yeah, I was wondering if this is a Filipino-American stereotype I didn't really know about.

jason's friends from the old days show up briefly in flashbacks. crazy ex girlfriend does have a season and double the episode length on the good place...

I remember Jason's friends being similarly dumb but I could be forgetting. Second point is totally fair and I do think Good Place is mostly really good on race.

no one is arguing for unjust slandering of floridians I see

Yeah, it might be more of a Florida stereotype than anything.

It is 100% a Florida stereotype

you know you're in the bad place if your soulmate doesn't even know who blake bortles is

anti-Florida, anti-dj bigotry is acceptable

that's not music...that's EDM!

jetskis, dance crew, djs, drugs, jetskis... imo Jason's life had it all

also his friend Pillboy, who is DOPE

I lol every time he talks about Pillboy

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