His new comedy series explores the depressing life of a grief-stricken man
Ricky Gervais’s new Netflix series delves into some topics that are nowhere near being funny: depression, grief, suicide, Kevin Hart. I’m not even sure After Life, which debuts March 8, qualifies as a comedy, despite having sitcom characteristics such as a high-concept premise and an amusing array of friendly officemates. It’s closer to the mark to describe it as a drama about comedy.
Gervais’s protagonist Tony isn’t a comedian except in a metaphorical sense. He’s a writer-editor at a small-town weekly newspaper of no consequence, and after his wife dies of breast cancer, he loses interest in living. He spends the evenings drinking and watching videos of her final messages to him. He is about to commit suicide when it occurs to him that there’d be no one to feed the dog. “If you could open a tin,” he tells his German shepherd, “I’d be dead now.”
Tony decides that, as he has nothing to lose, he’ll simply say what he thinks at all times. This means being aggressively nasty to everyone in the office and elsewhere. If this new mode of living becomes unbearable, he’ll simply end it all. “It should be everyone’s moral duty to kill themselves,” he says. No, he doesn’t say it in a funny way. At the outset, this series is an anti-romcom. Its message is that pain is all around you.
Gervais, who wrote and directed the entire six-episode first season of this 30-minute show, doesn’t steer away from the grief: There are more moments that are unbearably sad than there are funny scenes. Tony ends one episode sinking into the couch in a heroin daze as a fellow user empties his wallet. Tony’s father is in a nursing home with dementia. And, like Gervais, Tony is an atheist who can’t look beyond this life for hope.
As a portrait of depression and desolation, After Life is disturbingly effective. Tony is simply wrecked by his memories of Lisa (touchingly played in flashback by Kerry Godliman) and has found no way to deal with pain except drugs and needless cruelty. So no, I don’t recommend the show as a light evening’s entertainment.
Still, there is a real purpose to what Gervais is doing here. As we observe him collecting small-town newspaper stories — a feature on a man who insists the water stain on his wall resembles Kenneth Branagh, another about a guy who received five identical birthday cards from different people — a common denominator comes into view. Everyone has suffered, just like Tony. For some of these people, getting their life into even the most ridiculous of newspapers counts as an achievement. An appreciation of others’ difficulties starts to make Tony feel less alone.
It will be lost on few viewers that Tony’s contemptuous, smart-arsed attitude toward everyone is a bit like Gervais’s. “I’m always angry,” Tony notes, and that, along with snotty misanthropy, is the fuel for a lot of comedians. Tony’s say-whatever-you-think stance is in essence a comedian’s dream of expanding nightclub rules to cover life in general. What if you could tell every mail carrier and blind date exactly how boring and useless they are? What if you could tell a boy on a playground, as Tony does, “I’m an escaped lunatic. I like murdering little fat kids like you”?
That might be satisfying in the manner of alcohol or drugs, but it probably wouldn’t boost your long-term happiness. Coming to this realization, Tony undergoes a Groundhog Day–style rehabilitation as things turn a bit hopeful but also a bit formulaic, complete with a prostitute who turns out to be a sweetie and advice that “you can’t change the world but you can change yourself.” There will be hugging, an acknowledgment that being nice is a good thing, and a hint that Tony might be able to rebuild his life with the help of a kindly nurse (Ashley Jensen, who memorably co-starred with Gervais on the brilliant HBO series Extras).
Gervais, who titled his last comedy special Humanity, is making the case that mores matter and being clever with a putdown doesn’t make your pain more profound or more important than that of your neighbors. A mature consideration of shared humanity starts with realizing you aren’t the center of the universe. Maybe the average person doesn’t need to be told that, but Tony is a useful stand-in for every misanthropic comedian.