The Good Place premiere last night, and it was a forking awesome!!
We meet Eleanor Shellstrop (Kristen Bell), who had just died and is in what Michael (Ted Danson) calls The Good Place. There, it's like a magical place where everyone exists happy, has a soulmate, and can't die. The problem is that Eleanor is not supposed to be in The Good Place, and Michael messed up on the calculation. They think she's another person who has done many good things.
With that in mind, Eleanor meets her soulmate, Chidi Anagoyne (William Jackson Harper), an ethics professor. He learns about Eleanor's situation and tries to figure out that maybe it's a test to see how good of a person Eleanor is, but if we've seen who Eleanor was and still is, a person who gets away with things and acts irresponsibly.
We meet other characters like Tahani Al-Jamil (Jameela Jamil), a British-Indian woman who's wealthy, and her soulmate Jianyu (Manny Jacinto), who's a silent Buddhist monk. Not to mention the creepy, hilarious Janet (D'Arcy Carden) as the go-to-person guide for all the information.
As Eleanor tries to adjust to the new place, Tahani throws a party for the entire neighborhood. At the party, she and Chidi see that everyone doesn't have a wrong side to them and that everyone is good. When she returns to her tiny home (for which I would love to live), she tells Chidi her story that she came from a divorced family at a young age.
But as she goes to sleep, she wakes up to the sound of chaos as giant bugs walking around, giraffes, flying shrimp, and giant frogs. This whole thing freaks out, Michael. Everyone wears yellow and black striped outfits except for Eleanor, who is the one who has caused the chaos.
When Michael calls a town meeting, he starts freaking out and thinking that if you sweat, you lick it off or wipe it and then lick it off, which was one of the funniest moments in the episode. But soon, everything went back to normal.
For Day 2, Michael had the idea to give the people of The Good Place something to live a little. So they flew in simulation suits, but before anyone could go zipping and soaring, Tahani had the idea to clean up the mess from the weird event. Almost everyone wanted to volunteer to help, and Eleanor wanted to go flying, but Chidi raised and called them to do it, proving that Eleanor could do some good instead of evil.
As everyone was flying, Eleanor was cleaning up, looking jealous, until she took her last bag to the trash. It ripped, and with only five minutes left, she dumped the garbage everywhere, from inside a home to bicycle baskets. She gets the suit on, and as she flies up, a thunderstorm of trash is dumped in the neighborhood.
It comes to Chidi that Eleanor isn't worth helping to become a good person. It takes a while until she dreams of a night at the bar as the designated driver and blows off her friends to have sex with the bartender. Eleanor wakes up and picks up the trash in the neighborhood. Later, Chidi comes, and after seeing what she's doing, he helps her until Janet comes.
The next day, Eleanor and Chidi begin the long process of being a good person. Soon, a note slides through the door saying, "You Don't Belong Here." Who could it be? Who knows that Eleanor isn't who they think she should be?
An excellent first two episodes. I loved it from the moment Bell and Danson scene where we learn a bit about what's going on. It's undoubtedly a different kind of comedy with the imaginative side of things, which I love.
The different curse words from "fork," "bullshirt," and "mother-forker" are just so clever that I might have to use them now. Bell and Danson are incredible, as are the rest of the cast. The writing of these two episodes was excellent. Michael Shur has done it again!!!
Overall, I give these two episodes 10/10.
You can catch The Good Place at its regular time on Thursdays at 8:30/7:30 on NBC.
