Journey to the afterlife: How sharp comedies are laughing in the face of death

Forever Episode: Pilot | Pictured: Maya Rudolph, Fred Armisen

It is often bemoaned that far too much of television comedy is dominated by shows featuring people with a laundry list of neuroses, that we are letting comedy devolve into a wisecracking war between different sets of variously terrible people. Where, these viewers ask, is the good old-fashioned sitcom about decent people trying to get by in an indecent world? Niceness, one felt, just did not give comedy writers the kind of mileage that curmudgeons did.

Enter The Good Place , a sitcom created by Michael Schur and headlined by Kristen Bell ( Veronica Mars, Heroes ) and Ted Danson ( Becker ). Within the first few episodes, it was clear that this show was a game-changer for primetime comedy. The story is set in ‘The Good Place’, a paradise designed by architect Michael (Danson). The show begins with Eleanor Shellstrop (Bell) finding herself at The Good Place after she dies in a freak accident. Shellstrop soon warms up to her new home and its unique rules and rituals, all the while struggling to hide the fact that she has been sent here by mistake — she was not the righteous, selfless person Michael and the rest think she was during her lifetime. In reality, she was selfish, callous, and thoroughly disrespectful.

Keeping score

The fact that The Good Place is a show about the afterlife gives it license to un-ironically discuss age-old dichotomies like good/evil, individual/society, and philanthropy/selfishness. It also gives the show the bandwidth to try out zany little asides like a giant scoreboard keeping track of good and evil deeds (or a mysterious train that connects The Good Place to other realms). This is a handy formal constraint it shares with at least two other recent shows: Amazon Prime’s Forever , created by Alan Yang and Matt Hubbard; and the Adult Swim show Your Pretty Face is Going To Hell.

THE GOOD PLACE -- "Michael's Gambit" Episode 113 -- Pictured: (l-r) Ted Danson as Michael, Kristen Bell as Eleanor Shellstrop -- (Photo by: Vivian Zink/NBC)

The bleakly funny

Forever is tonally very similar to a Coen Brothers comedy — the dark humour, the oddball characters, and the crushing tyranny of the everyday. June (Maya Rudolph) and Oscar (Fred Armisen) are a married couple who are beginning to get bored of each other after 12 years of companionship. June is about to take drastic steps to change that — when the two die in quick succession and find themselves united in the afterlife, in a small community called Riverside. What this move does to their lives and their marriage forms the meat of the show. Armisen is a delight as the mousy, perennially emasculated Oscar. But it is Rudolph (who also made a memorable guest appearance in

The Good Place ) who steals the show, reminding us why she is regularly cited among the most under-utilised actors in Hollywood.

Past highlights

In one of the best moments of the show, June and a Riverside neighbour called Kase try their best to burn a piece of furniture from the latter’s house — but to no avail as the furniture keeps magically rebuilding itself. A frustrated Kase finally asks June “Do you really want to relive the same life before you got here? Is that why we’re here?” The way Rudolph betrays June’s emotions wordlessly here is a marvel — polite agreement mixed with fear mixed with naked pain and longing for a better life or rather, afterlife.

Your Pretty Face is Going to Hell is the most superficially light-hearted of the three shows, although it is not above a little morality play every now and then. The story follows Gary, an underperforming junior employee of Hell (or a junior demon if you will) who just cannot seem to improve at his job. If heaven is a genteel suburban neighbourhood in both The Good Place and Forever , hell in this show is the stereotypically inelegant and cutthroat corporate office.

Hell and more

Gary’s machinations are all designed to make him ascend the corporate food chain but for one reason or another, they inevitably backfire, only making him look worse in the eyes of his superiors. And the superiors in Hell are… suitably hellish. There are other ‘converse scenarios’ here, too, when you compare them with the other two shows. Just like Eleanor is too selfish to be a happy, healthy, functional resident of The Good Place, Gary is too soft-hearted to be an effective employee of Hell, the place built on a solid foundation of malice and malcontentment.

In different worlds (Clockwise from left) Stills from The Good Place , Forever , and Your Pretty Face is Going to Hell

In the Hollywood of a slightly older era, there were several uneven but essentially earnest films that tried to make sense of the afterlife: Meet Joe Black, Beetlejuice and so on. The current crop of on-screen afterlife stories tones down the do-gooder earnestness (although The Good Place is earnest in its own, unique, postmodern way) in favour of a ‘let’s-get-to-the-bottom-of-this’ zeal, a kind of forensic investigation of human desires and motivations. This is ambitious comedy, and who knew you had to kill off ALL of your main characters to do it?