"The Good Place," Year Three

Spoilers for the whole season ahead.

There's no getting around that "The Good Place" lost a couple of steps this year, having ditched its original premise, location, and modus operandi several times over for something a lot more free-form and untethered.  There were still plenty of good moments and a couple of great episodes, but I was a lot less invested in this season than the previous ones.

I think a big part of my criticisms have to do with the show's shift from Eleanor to Michael as the main protagonist.  Michael is the one who knows what's actually going on the whole time and is able to pull many of the strings, first orchestrating the reunion of the four humans on Earth, and then directing their existential adventures as they bounce from one arbitrary goal to the next.  As much as I enjoy Ted Danson, and as much as Kristen Bell is still a big part of the season, Michael's just not as compelling a lead as Eleanor. Her moral development is still ongoing, but largely backgrounded, and the love story isn't prominent enough to feel like the stakes are equally as important.  Michael, after last year's change of heart, isn't really growing or changing much anymore.

Then there's the plotting.  The first part of the season takes place on Earth, giving us a chance to see how the humans use their second chances at life.  However, Michael and Janet's machinations to get everyone into the same academic study in Australia feels like a lot of work for a premise that doesn't really pay off in a satisfying way.  New character Simone (Kirby Howell-Baptiste) has exactly one good scene, then a whole lot of nothing. Then, several episodes are spent with everyone making up with their estranged family members - the first time it's felt like "The Good Place" has had filler.  It's only in the last five episodes that a really interesting new mystery emerges, and the show goes back to its cliffhanger endings. And in the end, everyone is right where they started - with a few new variations, of course.

I've always liked the ambitious, big-concept, "anything can happen" nature of "The Good Place," and this season had some good examples.  The "Janet(s)" episode with D'Arcy Carden pulling a Tatiana Maslany was a fun digression. The visits to Accounting, the Good Place Correspondence Center, and Doug Forcett's place do a good job of worldbuilding.  However, other big ideas like Tahani dating an overlooked Hemsworth brother, the Good Place bureaucracy being made up of useless time-wasters, and the humans deciding to band together to be do-gooders, didn't really land.  It's the more character based episodes that I found the most impressive. By far, the season highlight was "Jeremy Bearimy," where everyone finds out about the Judge's experiment, and William Jackson Harper's straitlaced Chidi goes temporarily off the deep end.

I found a lot of the humor more hit-or-miss this year too.  The chili made of junk food and the terrible wine T-shirt in "Jeremy Bearimy"  worked. I didn't find much amusing about the Florida episode though. And a ton of the call backs and references to in-universe in-jokes scattered throughout the season fell flat.  I always loved the show's absurd eatery names and background visual gags, but it felt like there were too many of them this year, awkwardly shoehorned into too many scenes. Especially when the characters were on Earth, there was often such an atmosphere of comic-book zaniness that it was distracting.  The prior flashbacks to life on earth clearly took place in sitcom world, but it was a sitcom world with a more grounded sense of reality.

Still, the show is consistently more entertaining and thought-provoking than not.  I admire and appreciate that "the Good Place" has committed to seriously exploring moral philosophy, going so far as to having Michael and Eleanor spend an entire bottle episode debating over the existence of free will, and turning Doug Forcett into an example of a "happiness pump."  The resolution over the mystery of the point system makes total sense, and is perfectly in keeping with what the show is doing thematically. I suspect a lot of the ups and downs of this season where due to the creators trying to find ways to explore more material in this vein. Sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn't, but I'm glad that they're still trying new things and new storytelling devices.    

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