Here are five things that happen during the first episode of the new Ricky Gervais Netflix series After Life:

He calls a stranger a “fat, hairy, nosy cocksucker”.

He calls a child a “tubby little ginger cunt”.

He calls his colleague “fat boy”.

In a video recorded before her death, his wife calls him a “fat, lazy, self-pitying lump”.

Towards the end of the episode, his dead wife pops up again to call him a “fat twat”.

It is a punishing, wearying thing to sit through. It’s not funny. It isn’t clever. By the end of the first episode, you will have reached a definitive conclusion about After Life, which may well be “No thanks”. But that’s a shame, because After Life is a journey. It doesn’t end where it starts … which is good, because the start is horrible.

Gervais plays a suicidal widower driven to act out his most nihilistic impulses. Crippled by depression and with nothing to live for, he spends his days snapping insensitively unvarnished truths at everyone he meets. Nobody – not postmen or supermarket workers or children – is spared his determination to tell it like it really is.

There’s a sense that Gervais badly wants to have his cake and eat it. In effect, he seems to be saying that it took a harrowing combination of terminal illness, death, bereavement and suicidal thinking to essentially make his character behave in exactly the same way Ricky Gervais does in his standup act. It’s a bizarre hurdle for the viewer to navigate, and it’s flung at us right from the outset.

But it is surmountable. Had this been an entire series of Gervais untethered, swaggering around repurposing his old Golden Globes shtick on a succession on undeserving service workers, it would have been genuinely unbearable. Fortunately, it has a little more heart than that.

After Life contains the kernel of a really good series. It’s a redemption tale, keen to demonstrate how all the minuscule atoms of good in the world can pile up and make life worth living. There isn’t a single two-dimensional comic relief character here, either; everyone, no matter how incidental, is nursing their own form of heartache. When it gets things right, it gets things really right. But you have to cut through a lot of guff to get there.

Gervais has called After Life the best thing he’s ever done. This is patently incorrect. The Office and, to a lesser degree, Extras made all the same points about vulnerability and human frailty without resorting to the sledgehammer sentimentality that comes to define this series. At times, the sincerity here is punishing. It loops out in greater and greater orbits until it crosses an event horizon and returns weaponised and mutated. It’s so overcooked in places that it can feel like a strangulation. Death by mawkishness.



Plus, none of the redemptive moments in those shows came in the form of characters telling Gervais how great he is. It happens all the time here, though, over and over, with almost every single cast member getting at least one chance to call Gervais kind and funny and good. Worse, he isn’t actually very good at all. He’s a monster, directly responsible for ruining several lives in horrible, permanent ways. Gervais’s character does some genuinely irredeemable things, but they’re all brushed away by the platitudes of those around him.

That said, Gervais has always been good at finales, and this is no exception. Despite all my misgivings, After Life’s ending has managed to stay with me, for much longer than I expected. There is nothing remotely subtle about it, and it isn’t very funny, but stick with After Life to the end and the journey will have been worth it. Just.