Her ethereal-sounding new position actually places her in a dank basement alongside a single colleague, Craig (Daniel Radcliffe), who’s been working solo for thousands of years, answering the easiest prayers possible and sending the ones stamped “impossible” to God, who, shocker, has been ignoring them because they’re too hard to resolve. God, like a certain president, much prefers to hear compliments all day than to actually confront hardship and take steps to try and stop it.Īfter providing some sense of what God’s deal is, Miracle Workers unveils Heaven, Inc., the businesslike infrastructure that governs how Heaven works and where a woman named Eliza (Geraldine Viswanathan, a standout in last year’s Blockers) gets transferred out of her current role in the Department of Dirt to a new job in the Department of Answered Prayers. Disgusted, he finds himself drawn to broadcasts of NASCAR drivers who thank God for his role in helping them win races. In the first scene, God is watching TV in an attempt to keep tabs on the many horrible things - melting ice caps, deadly forest fires, Florida men being total idiots - happening on Earth. Miracle Workers introduces a God (Buscemi), who, with his flowing gray hair and casual attitude toward his role as overseer of all living things, comes across as The Dude’s feckless brother. The first several episodes of the series, which was created by Simon Rich of Man Seeking Woman fame and debuts Tuesday, drop the audience into its version of heaven without providing much of a foundation to cushion the landing.

That problem is a lack of thorough world-building. Both are comedies that, by virtue of their settings, touch on philosophical and spiritual questions about the meaning of life and the degree to which free will or destiny controls human existence.īut Miracle Workers has a problem that’s all the more glaring when considered in the context of The Good Place. Both reveal that the leaders “in charge” of the great beyond have no real idea what they’re doing. But it is inevitable.īoth shows imagine a version of heaven that is dysfunctional. It’s probably not fair to compare Miracle Workers, a new TBS limited series starring Steve Buscemi as an unmotivated God, to NBC’s The Good Place.

What if God was one of us, and by one of us, I mean Steve Buscemi?

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