The Good Place, season 3 episode 1 review: back on Earth and still wickedly funny

The Good Place never quite gets the fanfare it deserves over here in the UK – perhaps because, although it’s shown on Netflix, it’s not one of their own productions. So there are no big promotional campaigns; its stars don’t spend time on the sofas of Graham Norton or Jonathan Ross. Instead a new episode is just quietly released once a week, leaving the fans to pass the message on.

The first of the third season arrives today and, as is so often the case with this fascinating, warmhearted and incredibly oddball comedy, we have no real idea of what may come over the next 13 episodes.

The Good Place’s creator, Michael Schur, has almost single-handedly made American TV comedy a much nicer place. After moralising fell, rightly, out of fashion in the Nineties, many sitcoms took a snippy, often mean-spirited turn with Noughties shows such as Curb Your Enthusiasm, The US Office, Arrested Development and It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia – where jokes frequently blossomed from the characters’ self-serving attitudes.

But, with Parks and Recreation (which ran from 2009 to 2015), Schur found a way to warm viewers’ hearts without sacrificing the humour. His charming cop comedy, Brooklyn Nine-Nine, followed in a similar, award-winning vein. Others, such as Modern Family and Community, rode that same wave.

The Good Place goes a step further. In a brightly drawn afterlife, its four recently deceased protagonists navigate their way through Heaven (or the Good Place), while its plot throws up philosophical quandaries and questions the nature of free will, society and the capacity to do good. But it’s never heavyhanded – in fact, it’s perfectly possible to enjoy The Good Place without ever really engaging in such academic complexities. Its rapid-fire humour and colourful aesthetic, along with the pin-sharp performances from an eclectic ensemble cast that includes Ted Danson, Kristen Bell and British TV presenter Jameela Jamil have helped it to secure a healthy fanbase. But those that do engage on a deeper level reap the rewards too.

Much like Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, another American TV comedy that is shown weekly over here on Netflix and receives little in the way of promotion, The Good Place's premise is one that doesn’t suggest longevity – at least not without a change to the whole set up (in Crazy Ex’s case, the “ex” part faded as the ex-boyfriend story ran its course and gave way to a greater focus on mental illness). This is less a situation comedy than a circumstance comedy. Once the big truth about the Good Place – that it was in fact the Bad Place – had been uncovered at the end of season one, it became a wait-and-see game of how long Schur could continue changing things up to keep the story running. Michael (the “architect” of the Good Place, played by Danson), Janet (an anthropomorphic digital assistant, played by D'Arcy Carden) and the four recently deceased humans’ attempts to pull the wool over their fellow demons’ eyes and pretend that the experimental new system of torture was still going could only last so long. And so it was, at the end of the last series, when they were brought before Judge Gen (Maya Rudolph) to try to save them from the often-mentioned eternity of torture in the Bad Place, that the series jumped again and landed us, largely, back on Earth.

At the end of season two, the judge had agreed, at Michael’s behest, to continue the experiment by bringing the four souls back to life to see whether or not they could truly learn to be better people of their own volition. Michael swept, barely noticed, across their paths as he rescued each one from the thing that killed them. And although Eleanor (Bell) had succumbed to her old selfish ways, Michael had gently nudged her in the direction of ethics professor Chidi (William Jackson Harper), in the hope that the two would save each other.

The double-length opening episode jumps slightly back in time, to witness the return to Earth of all four, freshly separated and their lives saved, as Michael and Janet watch their every move via charming ticker tape machines in the Bad Place.

Of course, we don’t need to worry about them being apart for too long. But the intervening 45-minutes are filled with moments designed to elicit joy or knowing snorts from us world-weary viewers: Ted Danson as a bartender, Jason (Manny Jacinto) in a series of gaudy tracksuits, a grumpy immortal doorman who just really loves frogs, a philosophy book called Chocolate Book by Tay Zonday.

For a series that whips on by, soon a premise is established while remaining as opaque about what may happen next in that way that only The Good Place seems to manage. Curve balls are thrown left and right, and the gags barrage past. If you even only catch half, you’ve had a good time. And it still prompts us to ask the big questions (should we still eat blueberries if the pickers are mistreated? Why are chipotle and Aristotle pronounced so differently?)

Killing Eve’s Kirby Howell-Baptiste has now joined the cast as one of Chidi’s Earthbound colleagues. And apparently a major British comedy actor will be joining the series later. As for what else is going to happen, who knows? But it will be great fun finding out.