I happened to catch most of the penultimate episode of season 1 of this on a plane trip about a month ago, and it was pretty interesting. Then I was on a transatlantic flight a week later and saw they had all of the first season as in-flight entertainment, and I ended up watching it all. I am really surprised that something this good is a primetime network comedy. And season 2 has been incredible so far.
As someone with a philosophy background, I find Chidi to be a pretty interesting/annoying character. You know how there's a tv-scientist type that shows up all the time, who doesn't act anything like a real scientist, has no social skills at all, and is mostly there to offer technobabble and out-of-nowhere solutions? The philosopher version of that is pretty novel.
Something I like a lot about the first season is that it's basically one long argument for Aristotelian ethics, but I can't actually tell how conscious the show is of this. Like, obviously all of the stuff that Chidi tries to teach Eleanor about ethics is 100% useless. She doesn't become a better person because she's learned about deontology. She becomes a better person because she surrounds herself with good people and she makes a conscious effort to emulate and understand them, and this becomes a habit. This seems to me to be totally clear. But the show is weirdly celebratory about Eleanor learning from Chidi despite this, with it being presented as sort of significant that she can parrot philosophical jargon towards the end of the season. On the other hand, Chidi is in The Bad Place in part because he never cared about applied ethics.
Speaking of The Bad Place, easily the most unbelievable part of Chidi being a philosopher is that he doesn't just immediately have a ton of questions about the morality of a system which damns almost everyone to eternal torment, regardless of what he believes about where he himself has ended up.
