“Welcome! Everything is fine.” When you find yourself in the afterlife, you’ll read those tranquilizing words written in green across the wall - if you make it to the Good Place, that is. Eleanor Shellstrop finds that these very words would wreak havoc in her afterlife experience. In Michael Schur’s comedic TV twist of what a heaven or hell should be based on planet earth’s standards, four humans, Eleanor, Chidi, Tahani, and Jianyu, together navigate their way through their otherworldly struggles of the fine line between good and bad.

    So we begin with Eleanor Shellstrop opening her eyes to the sight of the aforementioned welcoming words, after which she is greeted by Michael, the architect of the neighborhood, and being told the story of her life as a lawyer who helped get innocent people off death row. His assistant, Janet, is a robot with alarmingly human features that knows everything in the universe. Ironically, all of the main characters create emotional attachments to her. In the Good Place, each person gets put in a neighborhood especially configured to each person’s desires and what would make them happiest, including a house. Eleanor gets placed a small cottage with a redundant circus theme, and is introduced to her soulmate, Chidi, a dangerously indecisive philosophy professor. A simple decision between muffins (as seen in season 2) could drive him up the wall. Here’s the problem: Eleanor was no lawyer that helped innocent people, (and no clown lover either), but rather a mean-spirited snob that cared for no one but herself. The duo, specifically Eleanor, find themselves in a feud with a neighbor, Tahani, a London-Pakistani conversationalist, who had an obsession with outdoing herself. Her soulmate, Jianyu, a buddhist monk dedicated to eternal silence, also can’t seem to connect with her. Thus, with an exciting storyline of zigzags and major plot twists, The Good Place proves itself to be one of the greats.

    Special effects are mandatory when discussing a TV show like this. The Good Place certainly delivered. Between having time rewind, shift, and destroy tangible objects in an instant, it’s certainly evident that production value was high and immense effort went into making he show. However, there were some instances, like where Chidi was struck with a falling air conditioner and died, where it felt like the special effects were unnatural and choppy. When he fell, he looked like a cartoon character that slipped on a banana peel. While the special effects weren’t over the top outdoing their competition, one could tell that there was high effort put into the scenery. For example, the neighborhood, which most of the show is filmed in, was beautifully decorated with houses and stones and restaurants and frozen yogurt places. Looking at a unified community like so is a sight for sore eyes.

Don’t just take my word about how spectacular this show is. The Good Place unsurprisingly won numerous awards, such as the TCA Award for Outstanding Achievement in Comedy, the Hugo Award for Outstanding Achievement in Comedy, the AFI Awards, and more. Additionally, 98% of Google Users enjoyed this show, and it got 97% approval on rotten tomatoes. With emotional connections the audience makes to the uniquely characterized people (and robots), how could you not love this show?

The Good Place, on NBC, definitely is among the most engrossing TV comedies I’ve seen in a long time. The concept is so simplistic but has specific underlying messages and it puts a lighthearted tone on a seemingly serious and everlasting debate about the afterlife. Clearly, those who watched and reviewed along with me didn’t regret it - and neither will you.