The Good Place

What the fork?!

Sci-Fi & Fantasy Comedy
English     7.96     2016     USA

Overview

Eleanor Shellstrop, an ordinary woman who, through an extraordinary string of events, enters the afterlife where she comes to realize that she hasn't been a very good person. With the help of her wise afterlife mentor, she's determined to shed her old way of living and discover the awesome (or at least the pretty good) person within.

Reviews

CharlesTheBold wrote:
The Good Place is a fantasy-comedy that was first broadcast on NBC in the Fall of 2016. Unlike most TV comedies, it is serialized, with a continuing story that flows from one episode to the next. It is filmed without a laugh track. The show has six characters. Two of them Janet and Michael (Ted Danson), operate a post-mortem world call the Good Place, and the other four, Eleanora (Kristin Bell), Chidi, Tahani, and Jason, are recently deceased humans who are bewildered to find themselves in the place. I find this a highly original show. It deals with issues rarely seen in TV comedy: death and the afterlife, guilt and responsibility, but does so in highly amusing ways (One running joke is a spell that overrides swear words with innocuous ones like "fork" and "shirt", much to the irritation of characters who really feel a need to sound off). It has a unusually diverse cast, three of the six main characters being Filipino, Asian-Indian, and Senegalese. Since Chidi is a former philosophy professor, it also has an intellectual side as he tries to make sense of his new eternal dwelling place. In contrast to the well-behaved "Good Place", we have frequent farcical flashbacks to the characters' wild former lives, a la "Lost". For viewers looking for something different, I quite recommend this show.
Sweatpants wrote:
Oddly Refreshing.
rsanek wrote:
Not bad, but I lost interest about halfway through season two. It felt like the writing quality had taken a dive and they started going for easy/obvious laughs. I am waiting for Kristen Bell to find a show where she does as well as she did in _House of Lies_!

Similar

The Andy Griffith Show is an American sitcom first televised on CBS between October 3, 1960 and April 1, 1968. Andy Griffith portrays the widowed sheriff of the fictional small community of Mayberry, North Carolina. His life is complicated by an inept, but well-meaning deputy, Barney Fife, a spinster aunt and housekeeper, Aunt Bee, and a precocious young son, Opie. Local ne'er-do-wells, bumbling pals, and temperamental girlfriends further complicate his life. Andy Griffith stated in a Today Show interview, with respect to the time period of the show: "Well, though we never said it, and though it was shot in the '60s, it had a feeling of the '30s. It was when we were doing it, of a time gone by." The series never placed lower than seventh in the Nielsen ratings and ended its final season at number one. It has been ranked by TV Guide as the 9th-best show in American television history. Though neither Griffith nor the show won awards during its eight-season run, series co-stars Knotts and Bavier accumulated a combined total of six Emmy Awards. The show, a semi-spin-off from an episode of The Danny Thomas Show titled "Danny Meets Andy Griffith", spawned its own spin-off series, Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C., a sequel series, Mayberry R.F.D., and a reunion telemovie, Return to Mayberry. The show's enduring popularity has generated a good deal of show-related merchandise. Reruns currently air on TV Land, and the complete series is available on DVD. All eight seasons are also now available by streaming video services such as Netflix.

More info
The Andy Griffith Show
1960