When Ricky Gervais comes out with a new project, the big question is: Which one of him made it? There’s Bad Ricky, the smirking cynic who revels in shock and insult and “Sorry, did I offend you?” And there’s Saint Ricky, the sentimentalist sad clown, who favors pathos and big emotional windups set to Cat Stevens.

“The Office,” a lacerating cringe comedy with a humane spirit, synthesized Gervais’s two sides into greatness. Since then, he’s intensified in both directions, but separately.

In his standup comedy and public appearances, he plays the anti-P.C. truth teller, saying what (he thinks) everyone thinks. In his TV series, he’s indulged his squishy side, a little in “Extras,” and a lot in the maudlin “Derek,” in which he played a beatific, childlike nursing-home worker.

The two Gervaises — the angel and devil sitting on his own shoulders — uneasily swap custody of “After Life,” which arrives on Netflix on Friday. The dark comedy’s six episodes, all of which Gervais wrote and directed, whiplash between vicious and mawkish. It’s the TV equivalent of making lemonade by alternating swigs of straight lemon juice and corn syrup.