After Life review: Ricky Gervais finds humour in grief, but all too often it’s a comedy of cruelty

Gervais' Netflix show falls victim to his desire to scratch at taboos ★★★✩✩
Alastair McKay24 April 2020

On the shelf of platitudes, After Life sits between “cheer up, love, it might never happen, and “you’ve got to laugh, intcha”.

The show, like much of Ricky Gervais’s comedy, is gratuitously offensive, a strategy which can be liberating, because “they’re only words”.

More often, it is merely puerile, because the words are so lacking in poetry, or any purpose beyond the desire to scratch a taboo and see how many nits fall out.

The first series was Netflix’s second most watched show of 2019. In the Gervais canon, it ranks third, ahead of Derek, tied with Life’s Too Short. It’s less fun than Extras, nowhere near The Office, but interesting in the way it tries to locate humour in grief.

Netflix: After Life - In pictures

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The central character, Tony, is distraught at the death of his wife, and decides not to varnish his despair for the comfort of others. The others, a collection of freaks who work in a local newspaper, try to cheer him up.

The second series is the same, but more so. The misery is redoubled by the decline of Tony’s father (David Bradley) which provides an excuse for a tentative relationship to grow between Tony and nurse Emma (Ashley Jensen). Emma’s empathic skills allow her to divine appealing characteristics beneath Tony’s misanthropic veneer.

Gervais reunites with Extras co-star Ashley Jensen
Netflix

It’s a skill she shares with Roxy (Roisin Conaty), the sex worker with a heart, and Anne (Penelope Wilton), who comforts Tony on a bench in the cemetery with such reliable patience that she might actually be an angel.

The other significant women in the show are newspaper colleagues Kath (Diane Morgan), who is allowed to be weird, and Sandy (Mandeep Dhillon), who really should get a job with more responsibilities. “Don’t wallow,” Tony tells Sandy, “you can get addicted to it.” He knows of what he speaks.

The men? They’re a bunch of absolute w*****s, so bereft of emotional intelligence that they struggle to exist in two dimensions. The most appealing of them is Pat the postman (Joe Wilkinson), who smells and is so unlucky in love that Tony sets him up with Roxy, the big-hearted tart.

Misery redoubles in series two - but many jokes hinge upon cruelty 
Netflix

Tony’s brother-in-law Tom has at least orbited the planet Normal, but is so hopeless that he now attends therapy sessions with Paul Kaye’s vile psychiatrist who delivers a brand of counselling rich in hatred, repression and jokes about raping Hitler. LOL!

While the plot plods towards Tony’s redemption, there is time for a half-digested routine about transsexuality via an implausible local newspaper sub-plot about a 50-year-old man identifying as an eight-year-old girl (“silly t**t”); and another about a heavily Botoxed woman whose private parts, she says, are “like a butcher’s bin”. The feminism of Gervais, like his acting, has its limits.

There is a moral, though it scarcely bears repeating. We’re all screwed up. It’s what makes us normal. A shame, then, that the jokes get their nutrients from cruelty.

After Life is streaming on Netflix now

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