jennegatron

The Good Place

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I've also gone back through and the situations Chidi gets put in are especially fun in hindsight. But I doubt it's gonna redeem the show for you or anything. I personally never cared much about the "big secret" behind what was going on...the setting lets the writers do basically whatever they want and it's fun watching the characters deal with this absurd place. And as a side note, considering the setting, I wouldn't count on the morality stuff going away anytime soon.

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What I appreciate about season 2 is that it feels like they though about how they would continue the show post-twist before they committed to having that twist. It's the sort of twist that can pull the wind out of a show because the writers are used to playing to a premise that no longer holds. The way season 2 plays out though, I get the sense that writers always knew this would be a show where the status quo would always be changing and were prepared for that.

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I cannot overstate how refreshing it is to watch a sitcom that actually feels like there's a progression between episodes.

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Started watching season 3, still great. It really is impressive how this show continually changes up the situation and dynamics but never loses its grip on the storytelling or humour.

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Yes! It's two episodes into the new season. Again, new situation, yet still familiar within the constraints of the storytelling. I have no idea how they do this wizardry, and I'm afraid to talk about it lest I break some beautiful spell. Enjoy it while it's here!

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I've enjoyed S3 so far and I really love that this show has the freedom (and is willing to) just make up the rules as it goes. The writers have so much fun with that and it's completely impossible to predict where things will go (in a good way). That said I do hope they stop rebooting the main group's brains. It's a bit frustrating when all the progress they've made keeps getting wiped out.

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There's a pretty good companion podcast, hosted by Marc Evan Jackson (who plays Shawn) where various members of the cast and crew are interviewed about things:

https://overcast.fm/itunes1388743215/the-good-place-the-podcast

 

They started recording it after season 2, so it's very spoiler-heavy on the first two seasons from the start. So... beware.

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19 hours ago, Professor Video Games said:

I've enjoyed S3 so far and I really love that this show has the freedom (and is willing to) just make up the rules as it goes. The writers have so much fun with that and it's completely impossible to predict where things will go (in a good way). That said I do hope they stop rebooting the main group's brains. It's a bit frustrating when all the progress they've made keeps getting wiped out.

 

Frustrating though it may be from the viewer's perspective, who wants to see the characters develop, this might be an incredibly wise thing to do for a sitcom. As a general rule, after three seasons, almost every sitcom starts souring as the emphasis naturally shifts from the situational comedy surrounding characters that have been designed to interact with each other in a certain way to the way these characters develop relationships. Comedy becomes drama. How I Met Your Mother's last season became an insane, never-ending wedding fiasco.

 

By rebooting the characters, the Good Place seems to circumvent this death trap. Of course, the development is still there, in our minds and obviously in the minds of the writers, but the characters can freely continue their streaks of what made them initially so appealing: Eleanor's brash do-whatever-I-want attitude, Chidi's whimpering indecision, Tahani and her foppish worldly naiveté...

 

While I'd hazard the series will eventually do a 'we remember everything now!' kind of collapsing of identities, I'll also say that this is a good thing and keeps things fresh and uncomplicated (in its complication).

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Yeah it's good. The new season reminds me somewhat of the better metafictional moments in Community; in the same way as that show, it is extremely self-conscious about its own indulgence of sitcom tropes, especially the clanking machinations required to introduce characters to one another.

 

I hope it still has room left to surprise and excite by upending our expectations. I hope it gets weird. Community eventually became kind of inconsequential, but at its best it was fantastically strange.

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Michael Schur and his team are  just the goddamn best, I've decided. His name is on my favourite comedy stuff of the past decade.

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Oh, yes. In the downtime between Good Place S2 and S3, me and my partner binged the entirety of available Brooklyn Nine-Nine episodes on Netflix and had a whale of a time.

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8 hours ago, Roderick said:

 

Frustrating though it may be from the viewer's perspective, who wants to see the characters develop, this might be an incredibly wise thing to do for a sitcom. As a general rule, after three seasons, almost every sitcom starts souring as the emphasis naturally shifts from the situational comedy surrounding characters that have been designed to interact with each other in a certain way to the way these characters develop relationships. Comedy becomes drama. How I Met Your Mother's last season became an insane, never-ending wedding fiasco.

 

By rebooting the characters, the Good Place seems to circumvent this death trap. Of course, the development is still there, in our minds and obviously in the minds of the writers, but the characters can freely continue their streaks of what made them initially so appealing: Eleanor's brash do-whatever-I-want attitude, Chidi's whimpering indecision, Tahani and her foppish worldly naiveté...

 

While I'd hazard the series will eventually do a 'we remember everything now!' kind of collapsing of identities, I'll also say that this is a good thing and keeps things fresh and uncomplicated (in its complication).

 

I dunno I'd say to some extent the development is not there, because they're developing in the same way they have before (at least with respect to each other...obv the scenarios they are put in are way different). And the show has the narrative freedom to put them in whatever circumstance it wants to keep things interesting even once they already know each other. It's not been a big deal so far, but I do hope they stop relying on it in the future.

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Episode 4 is out, and it was another good'un!

 

Chidi's grocery store breakdown after the explanation of Jeremy Bearimy ("The dot is where nothing never happens.") is especially brilliant. So good to see that character let his shirt down. LITERALLY. (Dude is RIPPED, by the way.)

 

Jeremy Bearimy demonstrates a really good aspect of the show: how it's a constant struggle for Michael to put the unknowable of the hereafter into human terms, often using mundane examples ("It's Tuesday. In July."), and the comedy that can be mined from that.

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Episode 4 (actually 5, since the first episode was two episodes) is probably my favorite of the entire series so far. Megan Amram is definitely my favorite writer on the show, I think.

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Yeah, I caught up with the series now, that was a great episode.

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I enjoyed this ep a lot and I will eat up their Florida jabs forever (see attached tweet) but plot-wise I think the show has suffered a bit this season from having to really blast through things. I dunno, the developments of this episode just felt very rushed to me. Maybe a consequence of all the time jumps they've been doing? I hope things slow down a bit soon.

 

https://twitter.com/nocontexttgp/status/1054022814301384704

 

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I don't think they have to blast through anything, let alone the stuff they're blasting through. I think the show very consciously wants to keep moving at a fast clip. I remember after like, two or three episodes came out, the Internet was afire with people saying "pretty fun so far but this premise is going to get old fast." And then the show has gone through like, eight seasons worth of stuff since then. Eleanor revealing to everyone that she's not supposed to be there, everyone figuring out they're in the bad place, the neighborhood getting rebooted a bunch, Michael deciding to be good, Michael actually committing to it and not just turning out to be tricking them, the neighborhood getting shut down, the trip through the bad place and the jump into the portal to see the judge, everyone being tested by the judge, everyone being reincarnated on Earth, Michael and Janet interfering in Earth, the study breaking down, the humans discovering Michael and Janet are supernatural and learning everything, the group committing to do as much good as possible: all of these things could've happened at the end at, or been stretched over, a season. But the show definitely isn't interested in takings its time.

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It's knowingly winking at the audience: 'You know what's going to happen, so let's just skip to the good part.' And without skimping on character development!

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5 hours ago, TychoCelchuuu said:

But the show definitely isn't interested in takings its time.

 

Haha yeah, and like, I totally get why the jumps forward happened in this season. It would have been a retread of the cast getting to know each other that's happened literally hundreds of times already or it's exposition dumps of things the audience already knows. I think I'm just searching for what it was about that last episode that left me a bit unsatisfied. Maybe just that the whole "soul squad" thing doesn't seem very interesting. But then, maybe that entire premise will be gone by the end of the next episode haha.

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2 minutes ago, Professor Video Games said:

But then, maybe that entire premise will be gone by the end of the next episode haha.

 

Yeah, I think that's the best thing about The Good Place, as others have observed. It's got the perfect setup to dump any premise that isn't working or is taking too long.

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