Kristen Bell finds herself in 'Good Place'

By Robert Lloyd

Tribune News Service

The afterlife, being unknowable, is a great blank canvas, a gift to the arts. While perhaps offensive to the most scrupulous believers, we have long deemed heaven and hell allowable subjects not just for religious contemplation but for comedy, horror, treacle, New Yorker cartoons and art rock songs.

Kristen Bell plays Eleanor, who opens her eyes to find herself in the afterlife. Ted Danson is Michael who manages and also designed the portion of it where Eleanor has been assigned to spend eternity. The show airs at 8:30 p.m. Thursdays on NBC.

It also turns out that she is there by mistake, having lived an insufficiently good life on Earth to get into what turns out to be an extremely exclusive post-life club, its members selected for “using a perfectly accurate measuring system” that weighs good deeds and bad.

It’s a system that condemns almost all of normally imperfect deceased humanity to implied eternal torture elsewhere. And as in any system where nothing supposedly can go wrong, things will.

Created by Michael Schur (“Parks & Recreation,” (“Brooklyn Nine-Nine”), it has the feel of an NBC sitcom.

Bell (“Veronica Mars,” “House of Lies,” “Frozen,” “Forgetting Sarah Marshall”) naturally projects the air of a hometown girl with an impish, impious streak; she can play nasty, she can play nice, and she can mix them up into, like, nicetiness. Selfishness into selflessness, Eleanor is just her meat.

Danson, whom many will have known all their sitcom-watching lives, from “Cheers” to “Bored to Death,” is an actor with great taste in roles, who can play dumb, mean, smart, stoned or sophisticated while seeming to be completely himself; here, he is gentle and fretful.

This is a serial story with surprises in store. On the one hand, I like the short-order model; it makes the long arc shapely, sharpens focus, increases the likelihood of the show completing its season. On the other, having already watched five episodes, I’m sad I have only six left to go.