Most critics like The Good Place, and they like it for the same reasons. The praise clusters around Michael Schur’s writing, which several reviews call brisk, inventive and unusually cheerful about asking questions of morality, and around the two leads. Kristen Bell is picked out for her comic timing and Ted Danson for stealing scenes with little apparent effort. The afterlife setting, and the world built around it, is credited with making the show stand apart from other network sitcoms.
The reservations are about staying power rather than quality. Two early reviews find it gently amusing rather than funny and wonder whether the premise can carry more than a handful of episodes. IndieWire goes further, judging that the show loses momentum almost at once. The spread is otherwise narrow, six positives to one dissent, and the single later review of the final season suggests the doubts about longevity did not come to much.