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Surprised we don't have a topic for this. I thought it was a pretty amazing show for a network sitcom--structurally very clever, with an interesting twist every single episode, including the brilliant twist of the first season finale.

Premiering tonight at 10PM EST.

I was skeptical of the show when I saw the first trailers but my buddy made me watch the first 15 minutes of the first episode and I was hooked. My wife decided she wanted to watch it too and we both loved it. The twist at the end was brilliant, though I do wonder how long they can keep the premise going.

Tonight's premiere was just brilliant.  Loved the new tortures for Tahani especially.  Really, really loved how Michael-centric it's become, and the manic, desperate flailing as he watches his vision collapse is hilarious.  Did I mention that I love the concept of butthole spiders?  I do.

Yeah, they kept up the twists and turns. My guess would be that next somehow these four people have changed sufficiently through being tortured that the opposite is happening--they're growing towards The Good Place in ways that are persisting each time Michael restarts the experiment. Which I suspect could be the next twist: what if Michael is a double-agent trying to rescue people from The Bad Place? (Or what if he has to flee with the four of them towards The Mediocre Place in order to escape 'retirement'?) Lots of fun potential, and I suspect they'll keep us guessing throughout.

Where you been ?

I call Tuesday "butthole spider committee meeting", so I had to rethink everything about my present life.

I lurk.  🙂 I've got 4 kids now and a business to run.  So while I still try to cram in a little gaming at work I don't usually have much time anymore for message boards.

Holy shirtballs, but this show manages to surprise every time. They just blew up a season's worth of plots in a single episode and it was amazing.

I'm pretty sure now that the whole thing is set in Michael's Bad Place and that Janet is the one doing it--the Good Place is experimenting with whether they can make Bad Place demons into better beings. Or something like that.

Or, what if Michael is in the bad place and being tortured by constantly failing with the threat of being ended for all eternity looming.

I kind of thought Michael would end up where he is but I thought it'd be at least half a season. My only worry with this show is how long until they run out of new plot twists to throw at us?

They have an outline for the entire series, so they at least have a plan.

I just stumbled upon this on Netflix and binged the first 10 eps of season 1.

Holy shit this show is great.

4 kids? Shit, dude. I've been curious about the business, last we heard regularly from you, you were just getting started.  You should share pics of your proudest sometime.

4 kids? I remember you having zero.

We old.

This show is hilarious.  8 episodes in.  Literally have not laughed so much in a while.  The leaving party Tahani threw was the best thing I've seen Danson do ever and what was worse he totally captured the essence of my character.  Was like looking in a mirror.

God, sore sides right now.

In the mid-season finale, why does that last scene with Eleanor and Michael feature constant shots through the window? That struck me as super-deliberate.

Watching some of the first season again and it's amazing. Sometimes when something has a big twist, it ruins what came before it, because either it doesn't seem that the earlier part of the story is consistent with the twist, or everything is made irrelevant by it. In this case, it's the opposite--everything takes on a new meaning while still being extremely funny, and you can see from the first moment that the big twist was completely planned all along.

Danson's smile when his big secret is revealed is one of the great bits of comedic acting ever.

I've found even my girlfriend enjoys this show and she hates both comedy and fantasy/sci-fi stuff. This is practically the only thing on TV that doesn't feature British aristocracy/royalty that she's willing to watch.

More people discovering this show keep lighting up this thread and making think "hey, new episodes". But then there are no new episodes and I'm sad again.

But now there are new episodes!

Last night's was good, but I'm waiting for the next shoes to drop.

I think this went off the boil just a little when they left the neighbourhood.

But still great and still looking forward to what they do with it next.

It'll be interesting to see what they do next, yeah. Lot of ways they can twist or turn the situation.

You know when I say 'ashhole, I mean ashhole' right?  What the fork?

I think this one is going to find it really hard to hit the perfect pacing and rewatchibility of season 1. It worked well enough and I found it even sweet at times but I'm not sure how they stretch it out past a season 3. Perhaps they end up in the Good Place, discover it's actually pretty rubbish and overthrow the entire concept of an after-life? As a philosophy nerd I have to admit I do enjoy seeing some of the concepts being thrown around. Not super deep but how many modern sitcoms quote Kant on the regular? :grin:

The end of seaso  two seemed to be a natural ending for the show. I really think they should just have stopped there

Season 2 went someplace new.  Season 3 will probably twist into something unexpected just when we get used to the new status quo.  I have faith they'll keep this going for an interesting 5 year journey.

I am so impressed with these guys--and they stay funny no matter what the twist--that they can go as long as they want, as far as I'm concerned.

This really is a good series and I don't think it needs another season.

Why?  Because you don't see where it can go?  I trust them to find a good and interesting path.  Keep it coming.

Because it's done a pretty good job and hit a neat point to leave on.

They could do more seasons and they could be good and I will watch them too. I don't mean that it shouldn't have any more seasons, just that I don't think it needs them.

Yeah, I'd be happy with it ending there. I'd also haven been happy with them finishing Season 1 where they did.

I'm curious if they'll take it in the direction of changing up approaches to the afterlife? Like exploring reincarnation or purgatory type settings? I really like the show but it's hard to see where they can get themes to carry the newer series from that won't feel weirdly forced.

Well, the start of Season 3 seems like it will take place on 'Earth' with the quartet continuing their 'lives', but being drawn to each other.  I'm imagining there will be a storyline about Michael breaking the rules by drawing them together or something... my question is: Is that one episode, or all of Season 3?  I trust in them, but have no confidence I can predict where they're headed more tha n 5 minutes of show out...

I strongly suspect they end up on earth, are drawn together while Michael and the Judge watch. Then Sean arrives from the Bad Place and accuses Michael of making the test unfair, demands he gets dropped into the simulation and more hijinks. I don't think they will keep to a vanilla earth situation, the question is what kind of growth the characters manage to achieve? That's been the bit of this show that has kept it from getting stale set up wise, the characters have all shown some kind of growth (aside from probably Jason and somewhat Chidi). I guess it might be interesting to have a major arc of Sesaon 3 being Eleanor helping Chidi to actually improve, which would be a great mirror to season 1. In some ways the backdrop situation is less important than keeping the characters from getting stale.

I still like the idea that this is all actually an experiment of The Good Place that has gone sideways in some way, maybe by redeeming a demon more effectively than it has allowed people to overcome damnation. It would be kind of hilarious if the experiment is a wager between Kant and Schopenhauer or something like that.

 :awesome_for_real: Actually having a Season 3 or 4 twist where this is all a wager between Sean and the Judge (actually from the Good Place) about demons being redeemable would be a pretty awesome 1-up twist. Or revealing this Janet is actually the original Janet and thus God (or something).

I suspect the growth of Janet is going to have some kind of big metaphysical pay off since she seems to be pretty much omnipotent within her programming and that is now glitched.

Hmmm.

The problem with twists like that is they are not likely to compare well with the original twist which was so well embedded in s1 performances.

It seems a bit cheap to tell us s2 and s3 are not an honest PoV of the main cast. Possible to do it with a new or minor character ofc - but really hard to do it as well as last time. Every other line in the first few episodes is telling you the s1 twist, it only stays at all hidden if you aren't looking.

Well, think about it, they have iterated new situations and characters over time: the first Bad Place group; Sean; the Medium Place; more Bad Place people; the Judge. There's room for them to suddenly "widen out" the scope with something that functions like a twist: that none of this is what it seems, and that all the characters have the wrong idea, even the demons. Janet seems the obvious macguffin to use to change the status quo yet again, considering Michael's story of how he acquired her. An omni-capable automaton associated with Heaven brought into Hell with the idea that she'd lend it all a 'real' heavenly feeling? In retrospect that seems like a plan almost destined to go wrong.

Re Kant and Schopenhauer: I don't think the show can lean that far in to philosophy without losing the balance it currently has - but certainly your first sentence is where I thought the show was going at various points, and I wouldn't be surprised if it still ends up there.

Edit: To be honest, this would make a far more interesting Season 3 than continuing down some soap opera route with the Earth simulation. This show is far more interesting, and funnier, when its characters don't have any sure footing.

At the end of last season I assumed next step was Michael and Janet in the real world.

'Retirement' is also unexplored.

Real world and 'Retirement' being the same thing is not out of the question.

If the other characters are in on it? Yeah that wouldn't work so well. Having either 1) Everyone else being dupes or 2) Sean and Janet being in on it in some way would be interesting. I think it works well at continuing to widen the world but I don't think it will work as well as the s1 twist, partly because you can't just keep coming up with twists and them working as well and partly because I don't think this has been as neatly planned from the beginning. They definitely need to work in someone from the actual Good Place though.

Isn't retirement the thing where Michael would be split apart into atoms and burned across a trillion suns or something?

Let's put it this way: if someone told you a season of a sitcom would feature a significant amount of explication of Kantian ethics by a philosopher and it would be funny, you would have said, four years ago, that this was not gonna happen. That it couldn't happen.

So a hilarious bet between Kant and Schopenhauer doesn't seem out of the question to me at this point. Nothing does. For all I know Nietzsche and Foucault are going to show up as entertaining gay lovers and tell Jason he's the wisest of the entire group.

I'll send them a shinny nickel if the last scene of the series is Cliff Clavin telling Sam Malone, "... and that err... sums up the afterlife."

Season 3, here we go.

Yup! I'm feeling good about the theory that this is all about finding out if demons can become angels, with the humans as an entirely side issue.

Hopefully that was just the heavy lifting out of the way and the show can now get back to being funny.

You are ridiculously hard to please.

By the standards of this show that was a shit episode.

I don't agree.  We laughed lots.

liked season 2 overall more than the first one

didn't like the ending

Last night's 'mid-season' finale was great. D'Arcy Carden did an unbelievably great job playing most of the cast.

This season has had only about 1.5 good episodes for me so far, but I'll keep watching.

It hasn't been quite as funny or amazing as the first two, but still pretty genius by anything but lamaros standards, where Leonardo da Vinci is just kind of a duffer who has a couple of decent paintings and some meh sketches.

I'm sorry my selective appreciation of TV seems to rile you so much.

I was pretty amused by the episode that ostensibly took place in Budapest. They seemed to have done some filming on location, had people with Hungarian names in the credits... and yet, whenever those two artist dudes were 'speaking in Hungarian', it sounded like random mangled garbage.

... this is totally going to be a plot point in S6 when it turns out they've been in the Negaverse all along, right?  :awesome_for_real:

(but yeah, I'm digging this series a lot overall)

Continuing to watch a series where a 10 episode season only gave 1.5 good episodes makes no sense at all. How seriously should we take your negative ratings when you keep watching what you say are  bad TV shows?

It's the internet.

Right.  The internet where we argue because we know we're just that one post away from everyone agreeing with us.

Because the first season was one of the best tv shows Ive watched recently, and the second season was mostly good.

The Hungarian names were actually "Artistic Man" and "Artistic Man's Friend"... according to Reddit. :)

Oh yeah, the role names were hilariously mangled too. Basically, the first guy was "Jozsef Müvészember", which is... almost Hungarian for "Joseph the Artist Man"... however, the other person was called "Istvan Müvészi Ember-Barátja" which due to 'Művész" vs "Művészi" would translate as "Stephen Artistic Man-Friend" -- I assume they meant boyfriend? It made me think of the sign with trrbl mangled Hungarian in Sandman (THANKS STEVEN BRUST).

What threw me was the *actor* -- "Peter Katona" is actually a legit Hungarian name. Goddammit Péter, why did you betray your country and allow those imperialistic pig-dogs stomp on our, uh, ~cultural heritage~?!

Ahem... this has been a public service from the Hungarian Bureau of Useless Minutiae, no need to thank me! I'm sure we will have someone from Jacksonville around momentarily to complain about the inaccurate depiction of their airport taxi service.  :why_so_serious:

Joseph the Artist Man and Stephen Artistic Man-Friend are truly great names.

Oh, that was totally not the Jacksonville airport. Didn't resemble it in the least.

Interesting season overall. The twists and turns of the plot came really quickly; I sort of felt they weren't always being patient enough to let a specific situation produce its own humor. But Michael's discovery of what was going on with the points system felt clever (and actually pretty meaningful in a deep way) and the season ender was interesting.

I really didn't think they'd be able to come up with enough material to keep going but I'm still hooked.

It strikes me that with the new experiment they've left out a really key element of previous iterations, which is that Michael was torturing them in such a way as to prey on their personal deficiencies,and that forced them to be more self-aware and work on improving themselves. 

Really, Michael should have just repeated the same "make them torture each other" technique, since that has a proven 100% success rate with the original group.  He basically invented Purgatory.   :drill:

Which is kind of an odd thing if you think about it, considering that humans thought about that idea a long time ago.

The show is being really careful about pinning down exactly what the demons and Good Place admins and other immortals are, exactly, and the Judge doesn't really seem to be God. As it should be, but it does leave some questions unanswered (in a good way, in terms of room for them to offer some more twists).

There are a lot of good stories based on the premise of God going missing or refusing to come out of his room for hundreds or thousands of years. What I find the most interesting is that Michael himself has changed and become a better person. I never thought that was possible for a born evil Demon. I forget. Do angels and demons have free will or is that just a human thing.

Fairly sure that's making a point about nature vs nurture.

The nature of Satan is not something Christianity actually scripturally has anything to say about; contemporary evangelicals don't seem to know that they are largely riffing off of Milton. But if you buy Milton, the angels had free will, sure--the fallen ones made a decision and it was the wrong one and they refused to recant it. But the Bad Place demons in the show don't seem to me to be entirely those kinds of beings--and yet they do seem to have desires, personalities, distinctive natures. And free will, of some sort.

If you subscribe to the "demons are fallen angels" story, then clearly they had free will at at least one point.  I think theologians are divided on whether they have free will now; the popular theory seems to be that then the universe was still being formed, the angels had free will, and some of them decided to leave, but having made that choice they don't get to revisit it; the angels in Heaven are too wrapped up in eternal goodness to be capable of wanting to rebel, and the demons in Hell are likewise stuck with their choice because they're too mired in sin to be able to conceive of repentance.  The same is true of human souls after death; once you reach either Heaven or Hell the experience of being there makes it fundamentally impossible for you to choose to be in the other place.

The entire premise of the Good Place seems to be about upending that.  Certainly prior to the events of the show it doesn't seem that there was any precedent for humans to find redemption after death, because once you die you stop accruing points, so the implication is that the "point system" follows the same general rules of "free will" in terms of only getting to take advantage of it while you're alive on Earth, which would also mean that angels and demons aren't affected by it.  But then Michael does his experiment and all that goes out the window.

If you watched the Lucifer TV series you'd see them doing a riff on that as well that applies to angels and demons both. In that show angels and demons get what they think they deserve and God has nothing to do with it.

Anyone still watching this? I've been keeping up with it and they're doing the last few episodes of their final season. Tying off loose ends and finishing the story. It's still a fun show.

Still very fun. I am wondering what could possibly be coming next. I am assuming one more twist at least.

Oh yeah. I've been keeping up with the rumour mill and there are all kinds of bizarre theories any of which might be true.

I assumed at the end of this episode they are all off to do the test.

But could also imagine something about what a good place would actually be.

Last episode Michael said they didn't have to do the test because giving all of humanity a fair chance to get out of the Bad Place was worth a ton of points.

I have been wondering all along if there isn't another twist about Michael, Janet and the entire arc of the show. Remember that one of the basic ideas they've been playing around with is if people change when they think they'll be punished or rewarded for changing, is that really change?

Plus also this: is a Good Place where the minders of the Good Place are as ineffectual and clueless as the supposed Good Placers we've seen so far are, isn't that by definition *not* the Good Place? Does anyone want to spend eternity with a bunch of sincere but clueless middle managers in charge?

Well sure, but why did they say more than once that they do need to do the test, just to throw it away like that?

The test only works, just like points only worked, if the subject doesn't know about the test/points.


My feeling is that this also needs an answer, but also might be the question that is explicitly left hanging.

And given what a super good time main characters have had over the last 50 episodes, maybe they decide that just doing the test is the good place after all.  Or maybe everyone was in the good place the whole time, and the point of the good place is to fix humans after their time on Earth.

Once Chidi got the memories of the 800 rebooted lives he's lived he seems to have it all together finally. I wonder what would happen if the others got all of their memories back?

I'm not totally clear that they don't. This is a sitcom so I guess they only do if it is funny.

I don't think Elanor changes much--in most of those 800, she travelled the same arc (normally the person who figures out it's the Bad Place, learns to be more ethical with Chidi's help, etc.) only it's only once that she fully connects with Chidi romantically, which is the key memory she needs back.

Tahani seems to not have a ton of variation in her experiences either. She starts as a basically decent person with a serious character flaw (like Chidi) but unlike Chidi makes modest progress towards improvement with a lot of backsliding throughout the series.

Jason I have no idea, which is right and proper. I can't imagine him having a sudden epiphany that sorts everything out in the wake of remembering all 800 lives.

I think the others already got their memories back. I know Jason in particular got his back on the way to rescue Janet and then promptly forgot most of them again a few seconds later.

I find Chidi's "flaw" a bit weird.

Being indecisive doesn't feel like something that should send you to the bad place.

I go back and forth on that... it does cause harm to his friends and it is in his power to make a decision, so he does have some responsibility for the harm he causes, but others could decide to act without waiting for his decision, so they take some of the blame as well....

Yes, I did that just to be indecisive.  I'm bored.

If by being indecisive--because you overthink everything--you hurt people you love, you fail to do your job well, you keep your potential contributions to the world forever bottled up, you do not act decisively in situations that call for decisive moral or physical action, then that's a pretty bad moral failing. Think about it this way: a person who sees Jerry Sandusky in a shower with young boys, who has heard a lot of stories about Sandusky, who has heard Sandusky himself say bad things, but who is indecisive about doing anything about it because you know, there could be other explanations or there isn't enough information to go on, etc., is someone that the rest of us (mostly) hold culpable later on for failing to act. Chidi hasn't quite been that bad but we've heard enough moments from his life (lives) where he's been unable to sort between incredibly trivial choices and vitally important emotional and moral ones to see that it's a serious character flaw.

Of course it's not enough to send him to the Bad Place as it has been described in the show so far, but that's been the show's point: everybody is going to the Bad Place because the system is broken.

I just find it weird.

And one thing not discussed in the show is the point that this sort of flaw, like stupidity or disability, is the sort of thing that humans way back used to take as a sign of a person lacks virtue. But not so much today.

Again, it's kind of the point the show is making: that in the system they have, everyone is morally tainted and no one goes to The Good Place. I thought it was interesting that they tied that to modern life--that we're all enmeshed in systems that compromise us morally and we all have social networks that are so complicated and place so many obligations on us that we are always failing someone greviously, maybe in ways we scarcely guess at or understand.

I think the show has also been pretty clear that "do no harm" is not a philosophy that gets you to the Good Place. The requirement is that you are an active agent of good. Which sometimes means not acting, but more often means doing something with good intentions and taking responsibility for fixing as many of the unintended consequences as you can (also a very clear point of the show).

Last night's episode was amazing. The Good Place was in a surprising situation and the resolution made a lot of sense.

Series finale is next week.

I thought the last episode was pretty much perfect. All the loose ends were tied up and the show ended before I got tired of it.

Yeah. In a way the show affirmed its final episode by having a final season and a final episode when it was time to go, not long afterward. (I think that might even have been the point in the casting of Hypatie...most sitcoms go on and on and on until they're complete mush even if they were good to start)

It also closed the loop on the gag on which of the Friends would be in the Good Place.