The Good Place Review

The Good Place is built on a twist that would have been the ending of most shows and is the end of its first season, and what makes the series remarkable is that it keeps doing that, resetting its premise every few episodes and getting sharper each time. Schur's writers treat ethics as a plot engine rather than a lecture, and the reviews climbed steadily across the run because the show never coasted on its own cleverness.

Kristen Bell plays Eleanor as genuinely unpleasant before she is redeemable, D'Arcy Carden's Janet is one of the great comic creations of the decade, and Ted Danson gets to be strange and delighted in a way no other role has allowed him. The jokes come at a network pace, the puns hidden in the set dressing reward a pause, and the finale is one of the few in television that gets an ending right. The middle of the third season wanders and the moral instruction occasionally shows its homework. It is ambitious, kind and far stranger than a Thursday comedy needs to be.