3x01 Everything Is Bonzer!

[7.3/10] I like the idea of this one -- that every member of the group has had a life changing experience, and for a while, it gave them a breakthrough. Eleanor became generous. Chidi became decisive. Tahani became private. And Jason became hardworking.

But it only lasted so long. In each instance they had a setback, a serious temptation, or something else to throw a kink in their recovery, and they reverted to their old ways. Eleanor found that being good was so hard without enough results. Chidi found that being decisive can harm people just as being indecisive can. Tahani found that eschewing the spotlight can turn you into a spotlight-hogging self-help guru. And Jason found that hard work doesn't guarantee success.

In short, just that nudge that Michael gave each of them isn’t enough to create change, or at least lasting change. So it requires Michael to dive in and give lots of other nudges, lots of others pushes in the right direction, to get his team where they need to go.

It lets the show play the overarching plot a little bit. The idea of Michael and Janet working against the Bad Place team trying to thwart him, all while trying to make sure they’re not caught by the (Mark Harmon-loving) Judge, is a solid framework for what’s going on in the supernatural realm while we have so much going on in the mortal realm. And we also get the introduction of the doorman, whose taciturn, frog-loving ways are a comic treat.

But Michael has to keep slipping things past that doorman because his new plan isn’t just to give our heroes each a life-changing experience. He wants to bring them together (using, among other things, a painfully fake Australian accent). It’s a nice follow-up to last season’s finale and it’s name-dropping What We Owe Each Other. This show’s essentially founded in the idea that we need one another to become better people, so I like that Michael’s goal is to reunite everybody in the hopes that their revitalized team, in addition to their near death experiences, will be enough to make a difference.

And there’s already a bit of symbiosis. You can see Chidi’s lessons making Eleanor more virtuous, and Eleanor helping Chidi to get over his indecisiveness and woo Simone (whose “just playing” attitude makes her a welcome addition to the crew). Some of the false starts here veer into the ridiculous, but that’s just the attitude of the show. It’s a good setup, with some intriguing philosophical underpinnings, and the show sets it all up ably. [spoiler]Including an appearance from Trevor at the end -- which was spoiled by the credits![/spoiler]

My one beef is that I didn’t laugh all that much in this episode. The Good Place is often a show content to keep you smiling wide while not necessarily eliciting guffaws, but this was definitely an outing that made me say “that’s cute” or “that’s clever” more than it actually made me laugh. That said, there were plenty of solid gags, like Janet busting on Michael’s Australian accent or Jason figuring out who would be scared of Santa Claus[/spoiler]

Overall, this isn’t a homerun of a season premiere, but it sets up a lot of interesting things, recounts our characters’ histories over the past year, and brings them back together with a new setup in a pleasant way. You could do a lot worse!