The seven deadly sins television show tv#

Pride about being admitted to the Good Place. Pride about fulfilling their roles in paradise (good boyfriend, straight-A student, Buddhist monk). The through line for The Good Place, the factor that keeps all the characters off-balance, the power that keeps them deluded about the Good Place, is pride. And then there’s the lord of misrule himself, the tight-lipped Michael… who has a strange amount of ego vested in a neighborhood that seems so selectively imperfect. Each of them has their own set of quirks and maddening problems. In the first season, we follow Eleanor as she meets her fellow afterworlders. The Good Place is one madcap ride, frankly. I understand that hyperbole is the native tongue of entertainment reviewers, but this show is a real two-ton wowhammer of give-no-fucks. She got in under false pretenses… and knows it.

There’s just one problem: Eleanor’s not the person Michael thinks she is. Michael congratulates Eleanor on her life of good works, and says, here you are: eternity. Eleanor Shellstrop (Kristen Bell) awakens in a pleasant room, and is greeted by Michael (Ted Danson), the majordomo of the Good Place. An underachieving young woman finds herself in the afterlife. Mostly, it’s the medium doing what it does best.

The seven deadly sins television show tv#

You can read it as a religious text, an existentialist manifesto or a sly satire on how TV wears on our bones. Michael Schur’s The Good Place is a philosophical meditation disguised as a television show. I’m still going to be deliberately vague, because I believe some secrets are worth preserving. Still here? Don’t worry if you haven’t seen the entire program. Skip ahead and go down to Greed, if you don’t want the entire narrative kicked out from under you. Speaking of pride, let me tell you about spoilers. When it comes to lessons on virtue, you could do worse than the shows below. The Seven Deadly Sins seemed a fitting categorization. But eventually a show finds a theme, or it finds its way out of relevance.Įach of the TV shows below are extended meditations on a particular human frailty. It may be as simple as “Show life in the West Wing” or as complicated as “What’s identity?” Not that these ideas are planted from the beginning. Since TV shows are invented by writers, and since writers are known for loving ideas, it’s hardly surprising that the best programs usually have some unstated central theme in mind. Every TV show is a story about something going wrong.