The Good Place

What happens when we die?

It’s a question that has plagued men and women since the dawn of time. For observers of religious dogma, life on Earth is simply a rehearsal in the great theatre of existence. If they’ve been humble attendees: waited patiently in line, put money in the tip tray, sat slouched for the people behind; then when the curtain's finally peeled they’ll witness something truly special, an eternal production titled Bliss and Euphoria. If on the other hand, they’ve pushed their way to the front, put gum in the tip tray and brought a cushion to obscure the view of others; then when the curtain's finally peeled they’ll be greeted with something truly awful, an interminable production titled Pain and Suffering.

If, on the other hand, you’re an atheist and consider God a lousy work of fiction, penned by an ancient ancestor of Dan Brown, then you believe life categorically ends in death. That the soul does not continue its journey; rather one's flesh is made worms meat until the corpse is nothing more than glorified dog bone. For the atheist, life isn’t a moral talent show, an audition for an Almighty judge; it’s the real deal.

The Good Place is a sitcom about what happens after we die. It begins with Eleanor meeting a mysterious bow tie figure. He informs her that her time on Earth has come to an end. She has died and continued her journey. Understandably, she has questions to ask: how did she die – she can’t remember? Well, she was buying a cocktail mix for one when a line of shopping carts struck her, causing her to be thrown into the path of an erectile dysfunction marketing truck. Hence, why she’s now a stiff. She has another question to ask: how close were people’s theories on the afterlife? Well, the major religions were about 5% close, but “a stoner from Calgary named Doug Forcett blurted out a theory while high on mushrooms and it turns out to be 92% close.” Eleanor’s next question: am I (points to up) or (points to down)? Happily, she has made it to what is called ‘The Good Place.’ It isn’t what people traditionally would conceive paradise to be, but it’s somewhat close. Relieved, Eleanor looks forward to the next stage of her existence.

Eleanor at the gates.

Welcome to The Good Place, a wondrous sitcom devised and created by Parks and Recreation co-writer, Michael Schur. Typically, I prefer naturalism in sitcoms; therefore, it’s something of a treat to be thrown into something altogether different. On first sight, this might seem a world away from Schur’s previous work set in local government, but a closer look at his career says otherwise. For example, the last series of Parks and Recreation fast-forwarded to a future where corporations had taken over towns, leaving its inhabitants in thrall to products and marketing. The Good Place is also an imagined future. Further, his work on Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror episode ‘Nosedive’ feeds into his current sitcom, dealing as it does with datafication. In Black Mirror people were knowingly being rated on their every deed and action. However, in The Good Place, people aren’t judged in life by one another, but by an organisation in the sky: good deeds are totalled up, with the best players being rewarded with a bonus life.

Eleanor is in The Good Place because she has led a good life of moral virtue. Where so many have succumbed to the self, she has forsaken all ego for others. Her place in paradise is reserved alongside the few that have put their own interests to one side in the name of selflessness. After her preliminary introduction, she is invited to a welcoming talk with other excited inhabitants. Michael, the bow tied creator, explains how their performance in life led them to this place. His talk is backdropped by a screen that features blink-and-you-miss behaviours that caused their reward.

Hosted Refugee Family, Rehabilitate d Abused Pit Bull, Donated 16.35% of Lifetime Income, Anonymously, to Charities, Gave Out Full-Size Candy Bars at Halloween, Ate Vegan, Never Discussed Veganism Unprompted, Held Door for Person Behind You, Installed Solar Panels, Let Someone Merge in Traffic, Brought Own Bags to Grocery Store, Donated Blood, Self-Monitored Potentially Nauseating Mouth-Sounds While Chewing, Carefully Put Spider Outside, Helped Mom With Her Printer, Gracefully Ended A Conversation About the Weather, Attended Cousin’s Friend’s Child’s Jazz Dance Recital, etc…

Look at all the gags in there. The juxtaposition of the charitable: hosting refugee families, alongside the laughable: helping mom with her printer, demonstrate a master craftsman at work. And the crazy thing? These jokes happen so quickly you might miss them. To get all the gags you have to rewind, re-watch and, in the case above, freeze-frame the screen to enjoy the full benefits. Other sight gags include restaurants named ‘The Good Plates’ and a pasta store branded, ‘Hokey Gnocchi’ in tribute to the participation dance routine.

Michael (Ted Danson) welcomes people to The Good Place.

After Eleanor has got her head round her new existence, she is introduced to Chidi, who it’s claimed is her soul-mate. He doesn’t look like Eleanor’s type. He’s diffident and earnest, oblivious to his geek chic. But this is a new life for Eleanor, a fresh start so what does she know. Aware their souls are wedded beyond death do them part, she decides to confide in him. Her confession: she doesn’t belong here. Earlier Michael had said she had earned her place based on her work in defending innocent people on death row. The truth: she sold fake medicine to elderly people. Someone has made a mistake. Chidi begins to hyperventilate. He lives his life by a strict code: to hide Eleanor’s true nature threatens to send his moral robot into malfunction. What’s the alternative though? Confess her sins and throw her to The Bad Place?

Chidi can’t play God with Eleanor’s soul so instead tries to save it through philosophy. There’s not many sitcoms that have a character complain, “Who died and left Aristotle in charge of ethics?” Only for another one to point at the board and reveal Plato's name. Over the course of the series, Utilitarianism and Contractualism feature: all there to drive Eleanor towards goodness. In many ways the sitcom is My Name is Earl set in the after-life, where the protagonist must make amends for their past life in the hope of finding salvation.

Eleanor and Chidi.

Alongside Chidi and Eleanor, there are two other main characters that occupy the space. Tahani, played by ex-T4 host Jameela Jamil, and Jianyu, a Buddhist monk who persists in living a life of silence. These two are paired as soul-mates, but there’s trouble in paradise when they struggle to connect. A bigger problem is Eleanor though. Her failings on Earth may have gone unpunished. But here in The Good Place her sins are made manifest. At a party she rudely describes the skyscraper Tahini, a giraffe: the next morning a tower of giraffes run through the neighbourhood. She is a Beelzebub in heaven. If she isn’t turfed out, she threatens the very fabric of paradise. Kristen Bell’s portrayal, however, is wholly sympathetic, causing the viewer to will her on to redemption.

For a show that encompasses philosophical theory, its value is perhaps best argued using William Paley’s teleological argument. In it, Paley uses the analogy of the watchmaker, arguing the very intricacy of a watch points to intelligent design- a watch couldn’t have just fall into existence like a rock. So it is with God and the universe. The world's complexity proves a godlike creator. In the Analogy of the Sitcom, Schur is the watchmaker and The Good Place the watch; a comedy so brilliant it proves divine writers really do exist.

The Good Place is available on Netflix.

Back

In 2015 Channel 4’s longest running sitcom Peep Show ended. With its point-of-view filming and emphasis on internal monologue it revolutionised the genre. Starring David Mitchell and Robert Webb, the two played Mark and Jez, warring flatmates that hated and needed one another in equal measure. Like Steptoe and Son for a modern generation, the pair live the squalid life of cheap lager, expensive crisps and self-loathing. Mark, a white-collar worker, is ostensibly more moral than Jeremy; although darkness lies beneath. Jez, a work-shy freeloader, lives like the world owes him something- despite never once contributing anything to it. The two are interdependent: Jez needs Mark to sustain his unemployed existence, and Mark needs Jez to maintain his social superiority. Like the medieval court, Jez plays the fool to Mark's nobleman: the fact that Jez frequently makes jokes at his friend's expense, perversely makes him master. Throughout the run, the pair become increasingly amoral, dragging one another down in a way that only bad friends can. At the show’s conclusion, Mark is still sitting alongside Jeremy, contemplating how to get rid of him: a pox he’s been scratching for ten years, one that shows no signs of abating.

Jez and Mark.

Fans of the show then were upset when its creators Sam Bain and Jesse Armstrong called it a day. The peerless repartee between Mitchell and Webb had been confined to the museum of sitcom, only to be dusted off for retrospective viewing on 40D. Fear not though, because the boys are back, albeit in a different guise- but back nonetheless. To paraphrase ACDC, they’re back in Back: a new Channel 4 sitcom written by Simon Blackwell.  

Now Blackwell is a name I hadn’t heard of before. Normally, I keep an eye out for writing credits because I always feel writers – quite wrongly – have lesser status than actors. But Blackwell was a name I didn’t recognise. I should have because he has written episodes for Peep Show, The Thick of It and Veep ­­­- that's quite a CV.

In Back he’s created a sitcom where Mitchell and Webb resume their roles of uptight loser and immoral bully, only in the less oppressive setting of a village pub. At the start, Andrew (Webb) is giving advice to a taxi driver about relationships: initially, it appears he's advising the man on how to reconnect with his wife; this though is a pull-back and reveal. Moments later, we find Andrew is the devil on the driver’s shoulder, invoking him to cheat on his spouse with a younger woman. Stephen (Mitchell) meanwhile is in town, gathering groceries for his father’s wake: he’s bought sausage rolls – one up from the economy range – ensuring his dad’s buffet will have adequate catering. Andrew is en route because as a once-upon-a-time fostered child of the family, he wants to pay his respects. With the taxi ride indicating malevolence though, we’re not sure of what Andrew’s motivation is. For instance: why, when he only stayed with the family for a few months, does he insist on calling Stephen’s father “dad,” ? How come, if dad meant so much to him, he's only just turned up? Why is he muscling in on their dad's pub?

Stephen and Andrew.

Andrew is the ghost of Banquo, a threat to the dead man’s heir. His appearance feels like a haunting, forcing Stephen to confront his childhood. Whilst Andrew recalls their days together in euphoric technicolour, Stephen perceives them in drab monochrome. Director Ben Palmer does an excellent job in splicing the past and the present, allowing us to see how these memories diverge. Fans of the excellent Garth Marenghi’s Dark Place will also be happy to see Matthew Holness star as “dad” in these pivotal hallucinations.

In terms of the writing, it has the articulacy you would expect from a person that has penned the best of 

sitcom. Stellar lines of dialogue frequently permeate the programme. 

When Stephen's sister Caz is trying to impress Andrew by boasting about the local music 

festival, she effuses, “It’s got four stages.” Stephen’s pithy aside? “Like cancer.”  As well as brevity, 

Blackwell can do baroque. With the will leaving Andrew with  5% of the pub, he pushes through 

modernisation plans. Plans that lead to an increase in footfall and five-star TripAdvisor reviews. 

This worries the paranoid Stephen: they’ve been a three-star  pub for years, what are people 

going to think when they’re suddenly getting critical acclaim? His response is 

beautifully articulate: 

Seriously, you don't stick your head above the parapet with the TripAdvisor guys because you will call down a tsunami of shit. A sudden flurry of five-star reviews, they get suspicious, send the black-ops reviewers in, there's a string of zero-star write-ups and then you're fucked. It happened to The Plough in Harescombe, they flew too close to the sun.

Given that the BBC have been airing their recent sitcom pilots on Wednesday and Friday, and Jack Dee’s Bad Move has just seen the ITV light of day, there is a surfeit of comedy at present. Out of all of the new offerings, however, Back is the best by some distance. It isn’t just a worthy successor to Peep Show, but a great comedy in its own right. Bain and Armstrong may have called last orders on Mitchell and Webb’s biggest hit, but in Simon Blackwell they have a landlord worth every bit of their predecessors. Here’s hoping that when the sitcom ends, Channel 4 raise their glasses and call, “Same again.”

Back is on Wednesday, Channel 4 at 10pm. Past episodes are available on 4OD.

Sleep Well Beast

A new The National album is always an event in my life. Whereas other artists take the guest room: their music comes, their music goes; The National move in. Taking over the house, their tunes set into the plaster, becoming part of the fabric of daily life. Ever since I heard them ten years ago, the band has meant a lot to me. Whenever people talk about The National, they say things like, “their albums take a few listen,” or “you might not think much of it at first, but give it a while.” They are seen as growers: the kind of diffident school kids that people kick into the shadows; the kind, though, that when given time and attention bloom into something extraordinary. Although I understand other people feel this way about the band, it’s not how I would describe my relationship. This wasn’t a Harry and Sally courtship of many years; it was Romeo and Juliet, a sweet surrender, love at first listen.

It didn't take a whole movie for me and The National to get together.

The two missionaries my friend sent out on a conversion course were ‘Fake Empire’ and ‘All The Wine.’ I still remember the MixTape. “Fake Empire’ was the first track and ‘All The Wine’ was near the end – just like the track position on their respective albums. ‘Empire’ was sophistication to my ears. ‘Tiptoe through our shiny city with our diamond slippers on”- I’d been waiting years to hear lyrics like that. In a songwriting world of nouns, someone was using adjectives – gorgeous ones at that. The song is something of a siren though. Its earlier imagery is a deception because by the end there is talk of someone ‘falling through the sky;’ that along with a cacophony of brass suggest all is not well in Bush’s America. This juxtaposition of beauty and horror is what The National do so well. 

‘All The Wine’ struck me as the best distillation of drunkenness committed to song. It captures the sweet spot of drinking, a temporary heaven the demons can’t reach. Tomorrow you’ll feel murky and shit but right here, right now, you feel exceptional: the A-grade ‘perfect piece of ass,’ the charismatic ‘festival,' the showboating ‘parade.’ With lines like ‘the motorcade will have to go around me this time,’ the song is also very funny. The image of a drunk diverting a processional route is hilarious, pointing to an off-beat humour that many ignore when considering the band. After hearing these two tunes, I bought Boxer and then worked backwards through the albums. Then, like every other National fan I’ve had to wait for each new release; the wait for Sleep Well Beast has been the longest yet – four years: was it worth it?

Due to the solo projects of band members, Sleep Well Beast has benefited from a longer gestation period. Guitarists Aaron and Bryce Dessner for instance have been producing albums and movie scores for Frightened Rabbit and The Revenant respectively. The other band siblings, drummer Bryan and bassist Scott Devendorf were instrumental in curating a Grateful Dead compilation that features over 60 artists. And vocalist Matt Berninger collaborated with Brent Knopf on their album Return to the Moon. Although the band’s open relationship might frustrate fans waiting on an album, in the long-run this might be a good thing: the individuals can go out and sow their wild oats and then come back into the fold ready to make sweet music again. It’s better that the band give one another space, than resent the suffocating circumstances of tour-record-repeat.

Because the band have spent time working with others, it’s understandable that their sound has changed. The Dessners, the band's musical force, are friends with Bon Iver; this could explain the band’s evolution into electronica – a move he too has made. Indeed, the difference between this record and the last is the most marked since Alligator and Boxer, which saw the band look beyond their competencies and co-opt outside agents to form an orchestral sound. On Sleep Well Beast the sound isn’t red wine rich; it's more mulled and sketchy.

It begins with ‘Nobody Else Will Be There,’ which has Berninger's nighttime voice summoning his love home. He doesn’t want to be surrounded by strangers, but home with her – a motif that started on Boxer with ‘Slow Show’ and ‘Apartment Story.' It’s an understated opening, one that doesn’t come out of the traps like ‘Secret Meeting’ or ‘Terrible Love.’ Its coil of piano seeps into your brain though, and when Berninger changes pitch half way through at "Hey baby" your heart surrenders to the troubadour. Much has been written about the lyrical content being fictionalised- a Berninger marriage survival guide, if you will, where he writes his fears in the hope they won’t come to pass. Although this gets to the pith and the core of the album, it doesn’t tell the whole story. A later track ‘Dark Side Of The Gym’ doesn’t read or sound like a psychiatrist’s homework task, instead it sways and shuffles like a first dance. It recalls the romanticism of Richard Hawley, in that it’s a big wet rose of a tune, re-positioning him and his wife as Adam and Eve, being serenaded by cherubs in the Garden of Eden.

Critics are right to pick up on the thematic concern of a relationship in crisis AKA 'the seven-year itch.' One wonders how Berninger’s wife, a former New Yorker fiction editor, feels when she proofs ‘Day I Die.’ It’s a fiesta celebrating the passing of a relationship; a dream of an after-life with someone else. Its jubilant reiteration of death captures those terrible moments in marriage where you would rather be six-foot underground than next to the partner you love. It’s a booty call for the Reaper to make him a bedfellow of him. It’s a tune that puts the dark into humour. On ‘Empire Line’ too, the weight of romance weighs heavily. The feeling of not being able to communicate is desperate here though, less tongue-in-cheek, more heart-on-sleeve, "Can’t you find a way? Can’t you find a way? You’re in this too?" Towards the end, the song dissolves into a brass section, redolent of ‘Fake Empire,’ illustrating the enormity of the emotion.

Another preoccupation on the record seems to be mental illness; a theme best discussed with reference to ‘Walk It Back’ and ‘I'll Still Destroy You.’ The first with its blips and beeps is a malfunctioning robot. Our protagonist ruefully puts pay to Gandhi’s ‘Be the change you want to see,’ by decrying ‘nothing I change changes anything.’ He is the paranoid android of Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, alone and adrift, unable to see the wood from the trees. Inertia has displaced body and water; he’s comprised wholly of pessimism and defeat. Towards the end, the voice and guitar gets a little warmer with the concession ‘I’ll need you light.’ As yet he can’t see hope, but at least he knows it exists. 

‘I’ll Still Destroy You’ has Berninger climbing out of the basement of his brain to reclaim his happy place. It tackles the early stages of medication when your body is thrown out of sync. There are moments when the caplets evoke happiness ("this one like your mother’s arms when she was young and sunburned") and shame ("this one’s like your sister’s best friends in a bath calling you to join them.") Even when levelled you feel hopeless, because clarity brings as much trouble as delusion: clear-headed, you realise you’ve got to get your shit together and clear up the house you’ve left to ruin. At the end though, we get that light again: ‘it’s just the lights coming on.’ For me, the coda recalled Bloc Party’s ‘So Here We Are,’ in that it builds to Berninger’s transfiguration: bathed in light, he achieves spiritual transcendence, accepting life is for living.

On the final track, Sleep Well Beast there is relapse, a sense the battle can't be won. The demon has scorched-earthed hope, leaving Berninger lost to nightmares again. This incoherence is mirrored in the surrounding guitar parts, which stir and stalk. Will our hero ever tame his monster? Or like Dr.

Frankenstein is he too afraid to?

Sleep Well Beast is an album full of demons and angels. It will take you into the pit of the human psyche, and elevate you to the skies of human creativity. After four years, the beast has been unleashed. Lie with it and tell me what you think.