We’re now up to date with all three seasons of this modest but very creative television show. It has picked up numerous awards, notably science-fiction ones, which it definitely counts as. I love it as a crazy, quirky shows that seems silly on the surface but is surprisingly serious about having intellectual depth.

The premise at the beginning is that the four main characters turn up in heaven, the so-called Good Place, after having died on Earth. One of them, Eleanor Shellstrop, realizes that as she was a horrible person while alive, she could not possibly have made the cut and suspects a case of mistaken identity. She soon discovers that Jason Mendoza, who is at first introduced as a Buddhist monk who has taken a vow of silence, in the same situation. She asks her assigned soul-mate, philosophy professor Chidi Anagonye, to teach her and Jason how to be good in order to keep up the ruse. Meanwhile Jason’s own soul-mate, wealthy socialite Tahani Al-Jamil, starts questioning, the wisdom of the soul-mate system. Naturally the whole setup is suspicious with Michael being the architect of the place and Janet as his AI assistant, and everything is overturned at the end of the first season.

This is a small show and feels like it with its small cast of characters and everything being filmed in bright and cheery studio sets. What special effects and costumes there are, such as demons in hell, look cheap and cheesy by design. There’s a logic to this however as everything you see is a sort of metaphor as the unvarnished truth would be incomprehensible to human minds. It’s like that episode of Star Trek: Voyager in which the crew intervenes in a Q civil war and perceives everything in terms of the American Civil War but extended to everything. So in the latest season Michael explains how time works in the afterlife by calling it Jeremy Bearimy and the interdimensional nexus of realities is represented by an IHOP. I actually do love the twisted logic of it all and how everything makes sense but is still silly.

There’s a vague sense that they’re just spinning their wheels as each season involves a reset of some sort and the characters have been wiped of their memories many, many times. Still they tend to undo the reset pretty quick and the overall plot does advance at an appreciable pace. It really is gratifying to watch the characters learn and grow over time. I thought that the ethics angle was a bit of a joke at first but this show takes it seriously and takes the rather audacious stand that learning philosophy makes one a better person. It’s way more than just name dropping famous philosophers. Where else can one watch a show that earnestly discusses the trolley problem or repeatedly expound on the different schools of ethics? They even write plots and characters based on these different approaches on how to be ethical. The seemingly silly balloon test of whether they’re the best version of themselves is right out of Plato’s The Republic. It’s not a replacement for actually studying the subject but it’s extraordinary to see this level of engagement with the material in a mainstream show.

I find the humor amusing at best and often just cringey. I do like the world building and the organization of the afterlife with its rules and bureaucracy. It’s worth noting that the season three revelation on how the points system actually works means that consequentialism is definitively true and not the other approaches to ethics. I also wonder how much further they can spin out the story while avoiding dragging in God and who set up the entire flawed system in the first place. All told while this show does get a little too silly at times, I consider it to be groundbreaking science-fiction that deserves much acclaim.