ALL COMEDY IS CONSERVATIVE:

So in "The Good Place," an ingenious metaphysical sitcom, [Michael] Schur (the co-creator of "Parks and Recreation" and "Brooklyn Nine-Nine") has a couple of challenges. First, how to invent a Great Beyond that amuses viewers of many faiths (or none). Second, how to introduce conflict -- the engine of narrative and laughs -- into a perfect world.

The second first: It turns out this heaven has a few bugs in it. The biggest is Eleanor Shellstrop (Kristen Bell), a self-centered heel who awakens after a fatal accident in what looks like a college admissions office. She's greeted by Michael (Ted Danson), the bow-tied "architect" who designed the bespoke subdivision in which she will spend eternity.

The Good Place, as Michael calls this higher plane, is like heaven if it were run by Whole Foods. It's a pristine, nonsectarian afterlife where arrivals are greeted by a sign reassuring them, "Everything is fine!" in the cheerful green letters of an organic cereal box.

There's no mention of any supreme beings, though, Michael says, "Every religion guessed about 5 percent" right. The residents are mostly young and attractive, by the demographic standards of the dead, and there is a ton of frozen yogurt.

Entrance into this hyperselective moral Harvard is determined by a complex algorithm in which one's every act on earth is added or subtracted from a point score. Plus: "Plant baobab tree in Madagascar," "Hug sad friend." Minus: "Disturb coral reef with flipper," "Tell a woman to 'smile.'"

Only a few souls make the cut. Everyone else goes to the Bad Place, including Christopher Columbus, every dead president except Lincoln and every deceased member of the Portland Trail Blazers. Mr. Schur, like Dante, realizes the most fun part of creating hell is getting to put people in it.

So how in the Bad Place did Eleanor get here? Mistaken identity: The management believes she's a do-gooder who spent her life helping the unfortunate. But after she gets the grand tour and is assigned an eternal soul mate -- Chidi (William Jackson Harper), an earnest philosophy professor from Senegal -- she decides to fake it. This throws off the community's cosmic balance, with disastrous and surreally C.G.I.-enhanced results. [...]

More important, Mr. Schur seems to have found a deeper idea behind the show's premise: Is acting good the same as being good? Through Chidi's tutorials, he even manages to work in a tidy primer of ethical philosophy (John Stuart Mill alert!).

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