TO AN outsider, “The Good Place” might seem like gibberish. One character is a cheerful omniscient being that lives in a void and is capable of materialising anything. Another is a sour-faced bureaucrat and immortal demon improbably named Sean. Frozen yogurt is the most popular food in Heaven. And in a recent episode, four friends emerge from Hell and humble themselves before a burrito in the hope of escaping eternal torment, before discovering, as Freud might say, that sometimes a burrito is only a burrito. But not only is “The Good Place”—which airs its second season finale on February 1st—bizarre, hilarious and smart in its approach to morality and the afterlife. It redefines the parameters of comedic sitcoms.

The show is created by Michael Schur, whose network cable credentials are well-established. He got his start writing for “Saturday Night Live” before producing and writing “The Office” (US), which defined a certain vein of early-2000s awkward comedy. Mr Schur pushed the format with “Parks and Recreation”, celebrated for Amy Poehler’s ambitious Leslie Knope and Nick Offerman’s curmudgeonly Ron Swanson. “Brooklyn 99”, an ensemble show about an eclectic group of cops, again illustrated Mr Schur’s championing of empathetic, progressive and quick comedy.

If “The Good Place” bears Mr Schur’s distinctive mark, it still feels wholly new. In life, Eleanor Shellstrop (Kristen Bell) scammed the elderly into buying useless medicines, among other dubious undertakings. After an accident, she wakes up in Heaven in a case of mistaken identity; she has taken the place of another, do-gooding Eleanor Shellstrop who had died at the same moment. “Fake” Eleanor, the show’s anti-heroine, is assigned a house decorated in the “real” Eleanor’s favourite style (clowns). She is introduced to her supposed soulmate, moral-philosophy professor Chidi Anagonye (William Jackson Harper). Eleanor confesses that she does not belong in Heaven, and convinces Chidi to give her lessons on ethics to ensure that she is able to stay. But, with an impostor in its midst, the Good Place begins to crumble.

The comedic potential of morality in the afterlife has been exploited before, in “Dead Like Me” (2003-2004) and “Beetlejuice” (1988). But the writers never let things become predictable: just when the viewer thinks they have it figured out, the narrative slips away in another direction. At the end of the first season the premise was wholly remade, with the revelation that Eleanor, Chidi, and their friends Tahani (Jameea Jamil) and Jason (Manny Jacinto) are actually in Hell. Their afterlives up to that point have been an elaborate form of punishment orchestrated by Michael (Ted Danson), a demon rather than an angel who has goaded them into tormenting each other. It is an unmentioned nod to Sartre: “hell is other people.”

The absurdity is tempered by strong character development. Mr Jacinto has spoken about the ways Jason is unique among Asian characters: rather than being a model minority or awkward genius, he’s at once sweet and unfathomably dim. Tahani and Chidi, the former a Pakistani-English philanthropist and the latter a professor in Senegal, are similarly contoured characters. Nor is this diversity by accident—Mr Schur told the New York Times that “six white people in heaven doesn’t sound like an interesting show to me.” It sits comfortably alongside the show’s other progressive tidbits. There is a special place in Hell, it turns out, for the first man to tell a woman “Well, actually…”

Who does and does not belong in Hell is the show’s overarching question, along with whether or not it is possible for people to learn to be good. Kant and Nietzsche are name-dropped regularly, and entire episodes are given over to thinking through moral dilemmas. In one episode, Michael conjures a literal trolley to work through the famous “trolley problem”, in which one must decide whether to divert a trolley, on course to kill five people, onto a different track that will kill another innocent. Plot twists hinge on characters picking up slight allusions to Kierkegaard, or learning to question not just what they do but why.

“The Good Place” manages its light and dark material with grace and skill; in less capable hands, playing off discussions of human behaviour with gags about Taco Bell might not have worked. But like Mr Schur’s previous series, “The Good Place” challenges the way we think about the sitcom medium. It undermines the idea that they cannot be intellectually stimulating and funny at the same time. The show may not offer an answer to the question of what it means to be a good person—but it hardly matters when the writing is this good.