The Good Place starts with a killer premise: Eleanor Shellstrop is dead, she knows it, and she is definitely not supposed to be in the Good Place. The show gets enormous mileage out of watching her fake her way through a heaven she has not earned, and Kristen Bell plays her with the perfect mix of panic and smugness.

For a while it is the smartest thing on television. It makes moral philosophy fun — actual trolley-problem jokes, Kantian ethics at brunch, and Ted Danson doing the world’s gentlest dad routine as an otherworldly architect. The cast is so likeable that you will happily watch Chidi teach ethics, Tahani namedrop, and Jason be Jason.

Then the big swings arrive. The show reinvents itself almost every season, and while some of those reinventions are genuinely breathtaking, others feel like the writers are trying to out-clever their own cleverness. The final stretch is undeniably moving, but it also gives every character a slightly too tidy ribbon.

Still, it is a rare comedy that wants to ask what it means to be good and actually gets you to care about the answer. Funny, warm, and just pretentious enough to be charming.

I forking love it.