Weird times when you’ve gotta pray for the angels,” Amily tells her boyfriend Clark as they drive away from the apocalypse on new Netflix comedy God’s Favorite Idiot. She’s being literal. Clark, played by Ben Falcone, is a middle-aged IT worker-cum-prophet. Amily, played by Falcone’s real-life wife Melissa McCarthy, was little more to him than an eccentric, pill-popping colleague until he started glowing – again, literally – at his desk.
The eight-episode series, created by Falcone, is chiefly set at Clark’s nondescript office – a warren of cubicles teeming with zany American co-workers who never seem to produce anything tangible. His boss, Frisbee (Steve Mallory, who co-wrote 2016 comedy The Boss with Falcone and McCarthy), turns out to be one of God’s lesser angels, concealed in the body of a middle-management stooge. Here is a workplace sitcom with the ambitions of The Good Place or the 2003 Jim Carrey flick Bruce Almighty, both religious comedies that ask what it means to be good, in the God-fearing sense. However, God’s Favorite Idiot asks an ultimately less useful question: if someone was a messenger from God, how would everyone else receive him?
