Afterlife

2016 · 4 Seasons · NBC · Comedy / Fantasy

The Good Place pulled off something that shouldn't be possible. It made moral philosophy laugh-out-loud funny, built a sitcom around questions about what it means to be a good person, and stuck the landing with a finale that left most of its audience in tears. Kristen Bell and Ted Danson lead a cast that turns absurd premises into real emotion, and Michael Schur's writing never talks down to its audience. A slightly weaker third season and occasional dips in comedic consistency keep it from the very top tier, but this is still one of the most creative and emotionally satisfying comedies of its era.

2022 · Shehan Karunatilaka · 400 pages · Literary Fiction

The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida is a wild, furious, blackly comic novel about a dead war photographer trying to solve his own murder in 1980s Sri Lanka. It's messy, overstuffed, and unforgettable.

2003 · 2 Seasons · Showtime · Comedy-Drama, Fantasy

Dead Like Me took one of television's most clever premises, a young woman killed by a toilet seat from a deorbiting space station who becomes a grim reaper collecting souls at a temp agency of the dead, and built a show that was funny, morbid, and surprisingly thoughtful about what it means to care about your own life. Bryan Fuller departed early in the first season, and the show's quality wavered without his guiding hand, but the core cast and the strength of the concept carried it through two seasons of consistently entertaining television. It never fully became the show its pilot suggested it could be, but even at its most uneven, Dead Like Me offered something no other series was attempting.