No spoilers, but the show is still in top form as a darned fast-paced soteriological thriller. The acting and writing are of course great (the other day I just had to rewatch Michael's laugh, which I've read described as "If a single laugh could earn an Emmy", which is true), but there's something much simpler and fundamentally brilliant about the setup of the series: once you care about the characters the stakes couldn't be higher, but because the conflict is about their goodness not in a capital-F Fall sense, but rather in the constant, complex, ambiguous interactions,there's always danger and shifting situations and the possibility of triumph and loss. They don't have to defeat evil, which is a one-off action, but they have to be good, which is a constant process where you keep forking up.

Also: demons.

Beyond the specifics of moral philosophy they discuss, The Good Place just bursts with the excitement and (not always enjoyable) thrills of deliberately and actively engaging with the problem of what it means to be good and how the heck to do that, given the givens. It parallels something common to many religious or philosophical movements/ideas/practices/etc, which is that being good isn't a restful Just Not Do Obviously Bad Things, but (also) a sustained interest in trying to understand what being good means in your here-and-now — it's more Sherlock on a Case than Anankin Making a Choice. It's active and at best precarious, and it's less about knowledge than about attention and care.

Yesterday I forked my sleep schedule by bingeing all of The Good Place. It's a really enjoyable show; more so if you haven't been spoiled, but even then the humor shines. It's immensely funny, but less a comedy than a locked-room mechanism epic, one that eschews metaphorical allegory and goes for surprisingly enjoyable hyper-explicitness. Recommended.