Maya Rudolph is Wondrous in Amazon's Sort-of Comedy, Forever | TV/Streaming

Yet worst of all, the need to play this kind of shell game with “Forever” sets it up as one thing, when really it’s quite another. It’s not as though the can’t-address elements of this series aren’t important, and often well-handled. But in the end, all of that stuff, cool though it may be, is just the peanut butter in which Yang, Hubbard, Rudolph, and company hide the pill. This is a series about marriage, and love, and satisfaction. It’s about the lies we tell ourselves and others. It’s about knowing yourself and your partner and your own desires, and finding the guts to admit to yourself the things you know. It’s about how life is short and decisions can have consequences that last forever, but also how quickly a change can be made. It’s complicated and silly and simple and strange. It’s a comedy, sort of.

June (Rudolph) is a woman sitting alone at a bar when Oscar (Fred Armisen) approaches. But as he does, some other guy swoops in, greeted with a familiar kiss. The camera pans left, and a montage (seen, abridged, in a trailer) shows us the years that follow: courtship, proposal, fights, milestones, putting a banana in a dishwasher, the works. Then they go to a lakehouse, catch a fish, and sit down to feast. Then the lakehouse again, the fish, the meal. And again, and again, June’s resignation becoming more and more evident with each repetition. At long last—efficient, graceful minutes in the series, years in the relationship—she proposes a change. A ski trip. A cold mountainside instead of a brisk lakeside. It’s a little variation, and it changes their lives forever.

That’s an inadequate summary, for all the reasons listed above and because “Forever” is far more concerned with pulling us into June’s life, and letting us roll around in the intricacies and contradictions found therein, than it ever is in story. “Forever” shares a few writers with Michael Schur’s “The Good Place,” and both shows demonstrate a similar outsize ambition when it comes to theme, density, and complexity. Both reveal their depths as they’re savored. Both look at big ideas and concepts through the lens of people with fears and hang-ups a lot like ours. But while “The Good Place” concerns itself with matters moral, ethical, and philosophical, however, “Forever” dwells in the realm of the personal. The question is not “what do we owe to each other?,” but “how can you love someone and be frustrated, even bored by them?” It’s not “what is goodness?” It’s “what is a marriage, what do we take from it, and what do we owe in return?”