The Good Place is the best comedy on Netflix you’re not watching

AUSTRALIANS might be getting it a year later than the Americans but at least it’s finally here. And you need to start watching it, immediately.

FOR its 13-episode first season, The Good Place was a clever and imaginative comedy with good writing and a great cast.

Then came the end-of-season twist — a world-changing, jaw-dropping twist that completely rewrote the rules of the show. The kind of twist that makes you immediately want to rewatch the whole first season to see if there were any breadcrumbs or if it was earnt. Yes, and yes.

I won’t reveal what the twist is in case you haven’t seen it, and I want you to see it. Because its second season is confident and properly brilliant — it’s one of the best comedies currently on TV and it would be a real shame if you missed it.

The first season finally debuted in Australia when the whole first season dropped on Netflix two weeks ago. It was a year behind the Americans but the good news is you get to go straight onto the second season with new episodes available on the streaming platform hours after the US broadcast every Friday night — there have been two episodes so far.

The Good Place is particularly surprising because in the US it airs on a free-to-air channel rather than a cable or streaming service, and it’s rare to get smart, high-concept comedies from broadcast networks that would rather duplicate the canned “laughter” of the likes of Kevin Can Wait. Though, NBC’s comedies are traditionally better than CBS’s.

It’s actually shocking that you’re not watching The Good Place.

Created by Mike Schur (The Office, Parks and Recreation, Brooklyn Nine-Nine), The Good Place is one of those comedies that is unambiguously a comedy, with a decent laughs-per-minute ratio but isn’t, obviously, as prosaic as a traditional sitcom.

Eleanor Shellstrop (Kristen Bell) wakes up in the afterlife and is told by Michael (Ted Danson), a kind of patriarch-type figure, that because she was such a good person on Earth, she gets to spend the rest of eternity in the Good Place.

Eleanor’s neighbourhood in the Good Place is kind of a candy-coloured slice of the world where there is abundant frozen yoghurt and everything is tailor-made to your desires. As opposed to the Bad Place, a hellish existence filled with terrifying screams.

When Eleanor is introduced to her “soulmate” Chidi (William Jackson Harper), an indecisive Senegalese philosophy professor, she confides in him her big secret: She’s not supposed to be there.

Eleanor is not the human rights saint Michael thinks she is. She’s more the margarita-drinking, shonky-“medicine”-schilling kind of dirtbag that should definitely be in the Bad Place.

She recruits Chidi to teach her how to be a “good person” while desperately trying to hide the truth from Michael and her neighbours, rich aristocrat Tahani (Jameela Jamil) and silent monk Jianyu (Manny Jacinto).

Everything is great! No, really.

One of the most extraordinary things about The Good Place is that a show that regularly name-drops Emmanuel Kant, Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics or the utilitarianism of John Stuart Mill can be riveting.

It takes complex ethical concepts and distils them in a way, often hilariously or absurdly, that will teach you much more than a whole semester of first-year uni philosophy could ever hope to do. And you won’t get any flashbacks to that final exam that still haunts a decade and a half later.

The ever-reliable Danson charms as the bowtied Michael, especially in season two, while Bell is at her best when she plays a pricklier character closer to Veronica Mars, the role that catapulted her to fame.

The Good Place is such an ambitious and wildly creative TV show like few others and the writing and plotting here are wonderful, as are its fully realised characters.

Best of all, it’s so bingeable. So what are you waiting for? Go binge it. Now.

The Good Place is currently streaming on Netflix. New episodes of season two are released on Friday nights.

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