She’s a narcissist with parental encouragement and support. Any rational analysis will show that Tahani is just as talented but in other things her parents value less. It’s created a negative feedback loop in Tahani and a positive feedback loop - also bad - in Kamilla.
I think Kamilla will die and Tahani redeems herself by forgiving and rescuing her.
Finally got to see episode 1–it’s a great start. Lots of potential complications, and we can see that the Big Questions will get their due in a highly-entertaining fashion.
I’m still intrigued by the possibility that it’s ultimately Michael’s journey that we’re watching. But to make that really resonate, will Maya Rudolph’s Judge continue to embody the Highest High? As we’ve been saying, the show has been cagey on the exact structure of its theological world-building. Will we be seeing someone higher up than a Judge?
There’s a nice article about the show in The New York Times. It’s mostly a profile of Michael Schur, the creator and genius behind the show, but also includes brief interviews with the cast. It even has contributions from the show’s “consulting philosopher”, which isn’t something you see on most sitcoms. And it mentions Schur’s requirement that the cast and crew include “no jerks” (although I think that’s sanitized from “no assholes”).
What an excellent article. It had me laughing hard with these lines as a bonus:
New Episode: “The Brainy Bunch”
I won’t be able to watch it here until tomorrow, but I’m putting a useful marker as I know it airs in an hour in the US.
Saw the episode. Won’t talk too much to avoid spoilers, but I love how Shur set up the ending to this one in the very first episode this season. I love how he plays a long game.
That was really funny, the Australian version of an American themed bar was brilliant, and it was good to get a little more of douchebag Trevor. Forget Brexit and the Jags though, Gen missed the truly baffling cataclysmic effect of the timeline changing.
The NBC station I receive (I actually get a translator channel nearer me) is in Rochester, MN. They broadcasted the Trump rally.
Most of The Good Place was preempted except for the very end.
Guess I will have to watch online
Brian
That is a great article. I liked the focus on Ted Danson’s hand gestures. It’s something I hadn’t explicitly noticed, but once it was mentioned I could really look back and appreciate that aspect of his acting.
The article made me wonder, though. It did a good job of talking in glowing terms about the show without giving away anything more than the initial premise from Season 1, Episode 1. But if someone read the article and decided to check out the show for the first time by watching a recent episode, they’d be kind of thrown for a loop. Is this show uniquely difficult for new viewers to jump into, and is it getting worse? I’ve been trying to recommend it to friends of mine for the first time, but I’ve been strongly advocating watching it from the start. Unfortunately that’s a time sink that not everyone can commit to. I just hate to recommend anything that would rob the viewer of that great reveal at the end of season one, though.
What makes the show a little difficult for someone to start watching in the middle is that it’s a serialized sitcom, which is a bit unusual. So, yes, someone dropping in the middle is going to miss quite a bit but it rewards those who binge-watch. And that seems to be the new trend.
I gotta say, I was a bit let down by this episode. In particular, what was up with Trevor? How was “being super annoying” the most efficient way to drive the humans apart? If I’d tried to predict how he would act (always dangerous with this show) I would have said that he would appear nice and friendly while secretly sabotaging each of the humans in some fashion appropriate to their own weaknesses and issues. Instead he seemed to focus entirely on Eleanor, and his shtick got old instantly (both for the humans in the show and for us the audience).
I found the whole American restaurant thing to be just kind of obvious and broad.
Favorite joke: Jason wanting to take a spider into the MIRA machine.
Not original, either. Arrested Development did the same joke.
My own favourite in this episode was the backpack with the Canadian flag on it, though in fairness, The Simpsons beat them to that one, too.
Trevor was pretty pointless - I’d’ve thought the big twist would end up being that he starts to sabotage the humans, but gradually comes to form a genuine appreciation for them and Earth, which is a “good place” relative to his own normal hangout.
My favorite throw-away was the AUS Weekly (ha!) Eleanor was reading:
The Worst Hemsworth
See the brother they don’t want you to know about!
Kristen Bell posted a bunch of harder-to-notice jokes from that restaurant on her instagram. The menu is hilarious.
The Australian accents did not improve.
That’s a callback, no? Tahini made a reference to Larry Hemsworth as (I think), the “lesser” Hemsworth that she once charitably snogged.
That Larry was dressed as a doctor on the magazine cover that labeled him a LOSER was amusing.
Then there was Trevor’s shirts–the back said something like:
i went to Australia for (something about the scientific study) and all I got was this shirt and a bunch of new best friends for life.
Three episodes in the new season, and I continue to be impressed by the directions this show is going. This is pretty much the polar opposite of Status Quo Is God, yet there’s still so much fertile ground to be covered that there are no worries about getting stale or being written into a corner. The characters are both compelling and fun to watch in ways I never even imagined possible from the first few episodes, and there’s so much nuance that I’m never 100% sure of whom I should be rooting for or against. Great stuff all around.
All I really got to add so far is that I strongly suspect the overarching message (or one of them, at least) is a wholesale rejection of not only the usual conventions of afterlife shows, but traditional morality on the whole. Think about it. We’ve seen all the beats…stupid point systems, screaming victims, eternity, abandon all hope, very few make it to Heaven, stupid rules, all-powerful judge with stick planted firmly in rectum about all the wisdom and compassion of a drunk hobo, etc. And Michael and his subjects not only actively fight this system that supposedly could crush them like ants, they succeed time and again! Every time it looks like hammer is about to fall and the bad old status quo is about to get the last laugh, they find a way to slip the noose. This sounds to me like a very loud and long cry of defiance from a producer who’s had enough of the inflexible moral lessons he’s been taught all his life and is trying to spread the world about what it really takes to get to The Good Place (or wherever).
On a related note, could the way the Judge dealt with Trevor and the huge pile of stuff be a subtle hint that she isn’t really all that? Ninjas do telekinesis. Rank and file Jedi do telekinesis. Apprentice wizards do telekinesis. Heck, some 10-year-old Kai Lords do telekinesis (oh, look it up :)). Tossing aside a couple hundred pounds isn’t exactly a worldshaking ability. Given that nothing’s been shown to be sacred here so far, I have to think she’s going get taken down a peg at some point.
Trevor was just being himself and enjoying it. It’s just that himself is horrifically, tortutously annoying to everyone. He was only doing his normal demon job in a new setting. I think his goal was to drive the group apart again, just to be away from him.
What I don’t get is why Michael and Janet felt they had to rush back to Earth after Trevor was sent flying. He was the last obstacle to their experiment. Well, I guess they wanted to escape the Bad Place themselves. But won’t the judge just drag them right back? And can’t she just snap her fingers anyway and make everyone dead again, and the world like it was?
They weren’t rushing to earth, they were running away from the judge.
You would think so, but apparently not. As DKW points out, shouldn’t she have been able instantly move or vaporize that pile of junk? Maybe she’s not as all-powerful as we thought.