Brow Beat

NBC’s Least-Popular Upfront Trailer Actually Looks Kind of Awesome

The upfronts are over, the new shows have been announced announced, and all that’s left is data journalism. Variety tracked the total number of viewers for each network’s new show’s trailers, and the results were, mostly, not surprising. Shows that look like they might be good, like Designated Survivor, drew a lot of eyeballs, shows that look terrible, like Pure Genius and Imaginary Mary (seriously, try to make sense of that Pure Genius trailer), remained mostly unwatched. But there was one anomaly: NBC’s The Good Place, which somehow managed to be the network’s least-watched trailer.

That’s bizarre, because a lot of people should be interested based on pedigree alone: it’s from Michael Schur, who wrote for The Office and co-created Parks and Recreation and Brooklyn Nine-Nine. It stars Kristen Bell and Ted Danson, neither of whom is exactly untalented. The pilot was directed by The Cabin in the Woods director Drew Goddard, of all people. And based on the trailer, it looks funny: Kristen Bell is a good-for-nothing who ends up in heaven by mistake and decides to stay. It clearly draws a lot from Defending Your Life, but consider this: Defending Your Life is excellent. It’s true that NBC only had two other new shows, and one of them has a zeppelin, but their most watched trailer is clearly a Subaru ad in disguise, so that can’t be it. Besides, everyone can relate to secretly being a bad, petty person constantly surrounded by insufferably cheerful tryhards, right? Right?