BEST OF 2017: THE GOOD PLACE

8. THE GOOD PLACE (NBC)

          I’ve talked in various reviews, including the first entry on this list, about my distrust of the Big Twist as a narrative device.  That such reliance on the Big Twist could wind up being a liability to the hacker conspiracy thriller, and also the greatest asset to a goofy sitcom feels like a twist unto itself.  But the first season of Mike Schur’s theological sitcom kicked off the year with a pull-the-rug moment that would have made Lost or Battlestar Galactica jealous, recontextualizing what had already been an enjoyably goofy riff on the afterlife and creating the opportunity to create a second season that was wildly different from the first. There was no guarantee that being different would make it good, though, and it wasn’t until late in the year that we found out that it was actually better than what came before.  Now that the audience can see behind the curtain of the attempts to create a “paradise” that will make its inhabitants miserable, very different types of jokes and performances are possible.   And it has opened up a vein of unobtrusive metacommentary, as head fiend Michael has to corral the increasingly diva-ish demands of his fellow demons for plum roles and pointless accents, while trying desperately to stay one step ahead of the “audience” of narcissists and dirtbags he is in charge of tormenting.

But even before the twist, it was already something of a miracle that the show was good at all.  It had a super-high concept that would seem to require constant reexplaining, while also sealing it off from most guest stars and current events, and perhaps most troublingly, feeling inherently pretentious (a deadly but increasingly common trait for comedies).  “Sitcom as ethics lecture” seems like a tough sell, but if you are going to try to climb a hill that steep, it helps to have professionals like Parks and Rec/Brooklyn 99 vet Schur, TV’s fun uncle Ted Danson, Veronica Mars herself, shameless scene-thief Darcy Carden, and pun-crafter extraordinare Megan Amram on board.  These people seem to understand that a sitcom based on the teachings of Kierkegaard and Kant all but demands an enthusiastic sense of absurdism to avoid feeling like homework.  And so the digressions on the nature of morality and free will are leavened by the oddest gags you’ll find on a network show, such as Carden’s perkily omniscient helper-bot designing herself a boyfriend with wind chimes for genitals.

The second season is only halfway over, but it has already burned through several seasons worth of potential plots already, zigging a half dozen times for each zag I thought I had puzzled out.  Nothing about this show should work, and yet it is consistently one of the strangest, funniest and genuinely surprising half hours on TV, and left this year on a cliffhanger that I am more curious to revisit than Westworld’s.  It may not be my absolute favorite show, but it is absolutely forking amazing nonetheless.   

Watch It For:  The restaurant puns.  Knish From A Rose!  Biscotti Pippin!  A Little Bit Chowder Now!