The Good Place on NBC

we liked the finale, there were for sure some tears. the last season might've been hit + miss but i do think they nailed an effective finale. i agree that the final door bit was disquieting but in a good + interesting way. it reminded me (sry for bothering ya'all w/ my own personal beliefs itt one last time) of this idea in some jewish traditions that the afterlife is a process first of shedding all of the impediments and flaws that we worked on in the living world (normally conceptualized in the place of gehennim where ones sins are burnt away) and then heaven being this place of infinite levels of closeness to god. the interesting bit where it coincides imo is that each level that you scale growing closer to god is a level where your own differentiation + distinctiveness is blurred next to the infinite godhead. i don't think there's supposed to be a point where you totally slip away into the nothingness (since afterlife is supposed to be a holding pattern for the resurrection of the dead which is explicitly about differentiation/specificity) but there's definitely this concept of being nullified before the infinite creator such that yr essence and the essence of that which animates all creation becomes porous. that's how i imagined their final door. the show did get me thinking about my conceptions of afterlife and the world to come (as distinct from the afterlife). acc to many kabbalists there will be two messianic periods - one will be within the natural world and the other will be supernatural. the one within the natural world will still include crazy things like all nations of the world being at peace, but the supernatural one will have stuff like resurrection of the dead. i was thinking about some of the more interesting things i've learned about the second period - what makes them interesting is that they're impossible to understand as literally stated. like that we'll slay the leviathan fish and cover a tent with its skin and feast on it for like thousands + thousands of years.

I have said this on multiple other threads, but I get tired of the dramatic payoff of these kind of upper-middlebrow comedy stories being “let’s make the audience care about if these characters get together in s3” instead of “let’s focus on entertaining and surprising our viewers with great plotting and writing.” Feels increasingly like “catching the feels” high concept is the new laugh track.

Obviously this show feels like it does more than just that; I should maybe start another thread.

In any case, once Good Place brought in the judge, I think that was one too many TWISTS for me and I never got completely back on board. Ending was mostly satisfying but various bad choices (take it sleazy?) and a general sense that some corners had been cut (and many added) left me outside looking in for dramatic closure. Tbrr I will still watch the JANET! spinoff though.

srsly - really should not be feasting on any kind of fish after the first day

dammit xpost

Part of what bugs me is how the show wants to have its cake and eat it too. Between the nudge-the-other-person-on-the-couch meta-comedy (Steenbergen! Offerman! Hey look it’s the show runner!) and then the “Don’t wake me when you leave to die forever” bathos, the theme vacillates too much for me to get into a groove. Any emotions I get feel heavy handed and overly directed.

Anyways, pass the Leviathan.

yeah a little bit it felt like crying at a particularly deft manipulative commercial but also you know you watch a show for a certain number of seasons you often catch feels at the end. even ones that overstayed their welcome a little bit. considering how challenging the premise ended up being i think they did a very good but imperfect job.

Yeah I mean that's the thing, mostly when this show failed it failed at trying to do something interesting, which is more than I can say for almost any other show, and a lot of the time it didn't fail.

It's definitely a thing where after a couple seasons, a formerly wry & funny show will just start toying with your feelings for your imaginary friends. That said, this show getting sentimental shouldn't be a surprise.

Ending was mostly satisfying but various bad choices (take it sleazy?)

pobody's nerfect

I mean, "take it sleazy" was a callback to a season or two ago when Michael mentioned that making that joke was among the human things he dreamed of doing. I do tend to agree if the point is that it wasn't really strong enough as either a joke or a dramatic moment. Giving an immortal demon-cum-angel the ability to take human form seems like a pretty big deal, though, and I'm not sure I get its significance in this show's mythology.

Hey look it’s the show runner!

I missed Schur's cameo?

The Offerman appearance wasn't on the nose imo - if you don't know that he's a famous actor who's also a woodworker, then he just appears to be a patient woodworker. If you know he's a famous actor who's also a woodworker, well of course that's who Tahani would want to learn woodworking from.

According to irl Offerman, that chair was total garbage btw. The producers had already selected a chair they thought looked nice and Offerman had to pretend it was quality craftmanship to his great dismay.

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