Forever flubbed

The Good Place, now in its second season on NBC, is a spunky comedy about the afterlife. While theologians might be balking, critics are swooning: The American Film Institute nominated the show as one of its TV Programs of the Year. Humorous and quirky, The Good Place picks apart the little absurdities of earthly life but gives scant insight into eternal matters.

Eleanor (Kristen Bell) has died in a shopping cart accident and wakened in an office, where she meets the supernatural-ish Michael (Ted Danson). Sporting stylish eyewear and a snappy bowtie, Michael is the architect of one of The Good Place’s many neighborhoods. Eleanor’s new address is Neighborhood 12358W, a utopian small town with frozen yogurt shops at every turn.

“This is not the heaven or hell idea that you were raised on,” Michael informs Eleanor from behind his desk. “Every world religion guessed about 5 percent” of what life after death would be like, he adds. Indeed, the show’s eschatology is about 95 percent wrong.

Michael says The Good Place accepts only the few individuals who did the most good while on Earth. Each newcomer is paired with his or her true soul mate, and the couple is assigned a specially designed house. Tahani (Jameela Jamil), a glamorous Pakistani woman and onetime philanthropist, shares a mansion with Jianyu (Manny Jacinto), formerly a Buddhist monk. As expected in a post-Christian conception of “heaven,” an ever-cheerful gay couple also live in the neighborhood.

Eleanor realizes she doesn’t deserve to be there and admits as much to her soul mate, Chidi (William Jackson Harper), a former ethics professor from Senegal. In early episodes, hilarious flashbacks replay Eleanor’s selfish antics on Earth, such as her scams to avoid being the designated driver on Thursday night bar crawls with her friends.

But Eleanor wants to become a better person. If she’s found out, she faces the prospect of eternal torture in The Bad Place. More than that, though, her own behavior begins to appall her, as it manifests in catastrophes for her neighbors. Once when she sweeps trash under a rug, garbage rains down from the sky all over the neighborhood. She asks Chidi to give her morality lessons.

Without spoiling too much, Eleanor’s presence is not the only crack in paradise. A major twist in the first season’s finale reveals Michael’s true agenda and establishes a different context for the second season, which many critics are saying is funnier and more inventive than the first.

The frequent sexual innuendoes might be par for prime time but make it difficult to recommend The Good Place. What sets the show apart from much else on TV are its clever writing and ingenious bits. For example, attempted expletives uttered in The Good Place are—naturally—translated instantaneously into tamer alternatives. Still, “shirt!” and “fork!” aren’t what many parents would want their kids hollering.

Danson is a perfect fit as Michael, and Bell makes Eleanor, even in her ugliest moments, entirely relatable. It’s the nonhumans, though, who provide the big laughs. Janet (D’Arcy Carden) is Siri in the flesh, a sentient robot who materializes on command. She’s able to retrieve requested objects and answer most questions, but like the iPhone app, hasn’t exactly mastered human idiosyncrasies. Trevor (Adam Scott) is a demon from The Bad Place who occasionally visits The Good Place. While dining at a fine restaurant, he commits the ultimate evil—clipping his toenails on the tabletop. And what do his fellow demons karaoke to? The Nixon tapes, of course.

Series creator Michael Schur has a good eye for the follies of American culture, but he and the show’s other writers don’t take up meaningful questions about sin and salvation. That’s unsurprising. Without God’s Word, people can hold only the spurious hope that the hereafter will be like the here-and-now, perhaps a little better.

That’s a bad place to be in.