"The Good Place": Afterlife Beefcake and Bonding

Eleanor (Kristin Bell) has just died.   Her guide, Michael (Ted Danson), says that after a complicated algorithm analyzed her good and bad deeds, she has been assigned to The Good Place, a village where 300 compatible good people spend eternity.

They seem to mostly wander around, greeting each other, getting frozen yogurt, and flying kites.  In the evening, they throw parties.  Eternity seems really, really dull.

Or is it more sinister, like the Village in the 1960s British sci-fi The Prisoner?

Each resident of the village is assigned a soul mate, someone with whom they are spiritually compatible to share eternity with.  Eleanor, an environmentalist lawyer/human right advocate in life, is paired with Chidi  (William Jackson Harper), a West African professor of moral philosophy who suffers from indecisiveness and tummy aches.

I have a lot of questions:

Shouldn't most of the people in the afterlife be really old?

Should most of their soul mates be their partners back in life?

And what do they do all day?

Eleanor has a secret:  she is not who they say she is.  Someone made a mistake.  She was actually a boorish, foul-mouthed drunk who worked for a telemarketing company, scamming the elderly into buying medicine that they didn't need, and in her off hours refused to donate to charity or recycle.

She schemes to make sure no one finds out and sends her to the Bad Place.

Her allies include Chidi; Tahara (Jameela Jamil), a snobbish philanthropist; and Tahara's unlikely soulmate, Jianyu (Manny Jacinto), a Taiwanese Buddhist monk who has taken vows of poverty and silence.

Jianyu has a secret of his own.  He was actually Jason Mendoza, a small-time hood who sold fake drugs to college students.  He and his buddy Pillboi (Eugene Cordero, left) were trying to break into a safe when he died.

Actually rather bad.  Another mistake!

Tahara did get $6 billion in donations for a charity, but she was shallow, egotistical, obsessed with money and fame, and intensely jealous.  She died trying to tear down a statue of her pop-star sister at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Wait...

The first season has a big reveal.  Spoiler alert.
















They are actually in the Bad Place!  Junior demon Michael got permission from his supervisor to try a new type of torture: Sartre's "Hell is other people."  Most of the villagers are demon actors.  Eleanor, Chidi, Tahara, and Jason are the only humans, brought in to annoy each other for all eternity.

Once they discover the secret, Michael wipes their memories and reboots the village.

They keep discovering the secret, and Michael keeps wiping their memories.  Over 800 times.

Eventually some of the demon actors get frustrated with their minor roles, and start working to overturn Michael's experiment. And Janet, robotic personal assistant/Google for the village, falls in love with Jason, then builds her own boyfriend, Derek (Jason Mantzouakas, left), and becomes an ally.


 The humans negotiate with Michael, his boss, and finally a big moderator, Judge Hydrogen (Maya Rudolph)  They argue that if people can change in the afterlife, becoming better, then eternal punishment is unjust.

The Judge promises to think about the issue, and in the meantime reboots them them all the way, sending them back to the moments of their deaths and making sure that they don't die in their various accidents.

They end up encountering each other.  Maybe they really are soul mates.

The Good Place is very funny, and the characters are appealing enough to make the show worth watching.

Gay content: Apparently, in spite of the male-female icons on the explanatory video, there are some same-sex soul mates: gay couples appear occasionally in the background.  And they are referenced occasionally:  one deceased person states that he spent the first half of his life in North Korea, working for women's rights, and the last half in Saudi Arabia, working for gay rights (it must have been a short life).  That's quite a lot for a comedy starring Ted Danson, who is not known as a gay rights advocate.

Beefcake:  The two male humans, Chidi and Jason, are both cute, and there are lots of other hot actors around.  All racial groups represented.

Chris (Luke Guldan, top photo), a demon playing one of Eleanor's fake soulmates, who rips his shirt off and says "I'm going to the gym" at odd moments. (Do spirits need to go to the gym?)

Uzo (Keston John, above), Chidi's childhood friend.

Demon actor Trevor (Adam Scott).

Luang (Hayden Szeto, left), a demon playing one of Jason's fake soulmates (a "best friend" rather than a romantic partner).

See also: The Prisoner