Miracle Workers: Dark Ages plays up the stupidity of yearning for the good old days

Salon.com

The second season of Simon Rich's TBS comedic anthology series, starring Daniel Radcliffe and Steve Buscemi, dresses our modern ignorance in medieval garb, says Melanie McFarland. "Depending on where you land in on the spectrum of partisanship or the existential depression scale, the Dark Ages season of TBS' Miracle Workers immediately feels more relevant and livelier than the first season. That season was set in a thoroughly bureaucratic Heaven where God, played by Steve Buscemi, is a boss who has grown bored with Earth and has to be persuaded by his angel employees, played by Viswanathan, Daniel Radcliffe, and Karan Soni, not to destroy humanity," says McFarland. "While that season wasn't abjectly awful, at no point did the comedy feel particularly sharp or absurdist enough to coax a person into investing in how things turned out for mankind. Part of the disappointment lies in knowing creator Simon Rich, the mind behind FX's flawed but visually inventive Man Seeking Woman, is capable of a smarter execution. Those who have never seen Rich's previous series might have simply felt that the show wasn't quite soup yet; in any case, the first season's writing could not hold a candle to superior treatments of what is essentially the same theme on series like NBC's The Good Place or even a previous TBS series People of Earth. By making Miracle Workers an anthology series, Rich and the cast essentially receive a do-over, enabling them to get out of a situational setting that doesn't quite work and reset with one that immediately has more relevance and urgency than Heaven-Meets-The Office."

ALSO:

• Miracle Workers: Dark Ages finds bright spots during a period that has been written off as one of the worst in human history
• Creator Simon Rich explains why he pivoted to medieval times for Season 2