The Good Place – Netflix
Eleanor Shellstrop is dead. And because she was a mostly good person, a lawyer who fought to save people’s lives, she goes to the Good Place. Only she wasn’t. A good person or a lawyer. Eleanor Shellstrop knows very well that she was mean and selfish as a human and is in the wrong place.
Her designated soulmate, Chidi Anagonye, was an ethics professor when alive and when Eleanor tells him that she came to the Good Place by mistake, he is unable to decide whether to denounce her or not. Instead he accepts Eleanor’s plea to teach her how to be a good person.
But being a good person turns out to be harder than expected, especially when Eleanor doesn’t like her neighbor Tahani, thinking her arrogant and condescending. Or when she discovers that Tahani’s soulmate, Jianyu Li, a Buddhist monk who took a vow of silence, is also a fraud and there by mistake.
Although the premise is funny, laugh-out-loud moments are rare in “The Good Place”. But the show captures with the philosophical questions it asks. How do you define good or bad? When is a person good or bad and can they change? Citing the great philosophers, the show follows Eleanor’s journey to becoming a person worthy of living in the Good Place until the twist at the end.
The first two seasons of “The Good Place” are available on Netflix.
