The Good Place has the potential in it to be a really amazing, fun show. It completely ignores that potential, though, in favour of playing things as safe as possible. It's frustrating, because the show has a fantastic central concept and both Kristen Bell and Ted Danson have the ability to make anything they are involved in better.
It turns out that they are not quite enough, and Danson especially gives a distractingly odd performance throughout (reasons for this can be explained away, but it's so off putting). The humour is extremely hit and miss, although most episodes did manage to get one genuine laugh out of me. It's a show that desperately needs to be more risqué and have more adventurous storytelling. Every character beside the two leads are bland, poorly written and certainly poorly acted (Chidi and Tahani being the biggest culprits).
BUT. The show does something unexpected. It actually pushes the narrative forward instead of sticking to the same conceit every episode, giving us new storytelling avenues. By the end we get that genuinely unexpected twist that re-frames EVERYTHING we've seen so far, and actually makes the show's annoyances suddenly make sense in retrospect.
Even if that hadn't happened, there's something about The Good Place that made me want to keep watching. It's completely mediocre but has enough of a spark that it succeeds in standing out, and given how the first season ended it could go somewhere good.
Best season in the series.
