The Good Place

Michael Schur, who made Parks and Recreation, has built a sitcom about the afterlife and used it to ask a question most comedies would not go near: can a bad person learn to be good, and does it count if she only does it to save her own skin? The Good Place ran four seasons of 22-minute episodes, 50 in all, from 19 September 2016 to a last run that began on 26 September 2019. It is good, and for long stretches better than that. It is also, for most of its third year, a programme that likes its ideas more than its people, and we will come to that.

The neighbourhood is the first joke and the best one. Matt Flynn designs it as a pastel town square with a frozen yoghurt shop on every corner, cottages built to each resident’s taste, and, for Eleanor, a house hung with clown paintings because the file said she liked clowns. David J. Miller and Barry Peterson light all of it flat and bright, like a brochure for a resort that has never received a complaint. Kirston Leigh Mann puts Michael in bow ties and a waistcoat, Tahani in gowns that would embarrass a coronation, and Chidi in the cardigans of a man who has never once been comfortable.

Ted Danson plays Michael, the architect of the place, as an immortal who has read a great deal about humans and never met one, thrilled by paper clips, baffled by grief. It is the loosest, happiest work he has done in years, and he can go from delight to panic in a single blink. Kristen Bell’s Eleanor is an Arizona saleswoman with no filter and no shame, and Bell’s trick is to let us see the exact second she notices she has been cruel and decides, grudgingly, to mind. The two of them at a desk, one lying and the other not listening, are the engine of the first season.

Around them Schur’s writers, Megan Amram, Joe Mande, Jen Statsky and Cord Jefferson among them, build an ensemble with no weak seat. William Jackson Harper’s Chidi is an ethics professor whose stomach hurts whenever he has to choose, and the chalkboard scenes, Aristotle, Kant, the trolley problem, are written by people who have read the books and still want the punchline. Jameela Jamil’s Tahani drops names the way other people drop crumbs. D’Arcy Carden’s Janet, the neighbourhood’s walking database, delivers appalling news in the voice of a helpline. And we laughed out loud, repeatedly and against our better judgement, at Manny Jacinto’s Jason Mendoza, from Jacksonville, who says the stupidest thing in every scene with the serenity of a man who has never had a doubt.

Not everything holds. The third season is the weakest: busier with concepts than with people, and the neighbourhood, the programme’s best asset, gets less of the screen. Schur’s willingness to tear up what he has built is a virtue in year one and something closer to a tic by year three. The philosophy occasionally stops being dramatised and simply gets taught, and 22 minutes is not long enough for a joke every fifteen seconds and a lecture. One of the reviews we read decided the whole thing ran out of road once the premise was spent. We think the reverse: the premise is the least of it, and the programme knows that before the audience does.

The first season ends on a turn we will not describe. What we can say is that the programme is different afterwards, and better, and that it earns a last episode which slows right down and lets its people sit and talk. That episode moved us more than a comedy with a frozen yoghurt shop on every corner had any right to, and the credit belongs to a cast who by then can do more with a silence than most sitcoms manage with a script. The editors, Eric Kissack, Colin Patton, Matthew Freund and Matthew Barbato, cut the early chaos, the shrimp in the sky, the giraffes in the square, at a clip, and then have the sense to hold still when the writing does.

Watch it in order and do not skip the pilot, which Drew Goddard directs with more patience than the form usually allows. It carries a 15 certificate, which is a strange thing to say about a programme in which nobody is permitted to say a swear word.