After Life

Gervais has sketched a predictable arc for his character, but Tony’s transition over the course of After Life’s six episodes is nonetheless heartfelt and moving.

Unexpectedly moving. [4-17 Mar 2019, p.11]

Under the laconic chuckles After Life is at once a scorched-earth portrait of grief and an impassioned exhortation to keep living.

Gervais is better at writing the characters he doesn’t play and directing the actors who play them. They hold the series aloft and give it layers, and may be divided into the silly and the serious.

While After Life turn navel-gazey--with one man working out his own issues--it still makes for a thoughtful, compelling dark comedy to boot.

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.

After Life finds its own pulse mostly when Gervais is doing riffs that wouldn't be at all out of place in his standup, podcast or other performative routines. ... It's harder to feel much in the repetitive loops of Tony lamenting the squalor of his life, meandering around town criticizing people for mundane behavior or staring at the endless movies that his wife left him so that, in the afterlife, she could be remembered as a plot device and not a character of her own.

There’s something to the idea here of accepting how all consuming grief can be, but that message gets lost when the show indulges Tony’s aggressive unpleasantness as much as it does. The turning point comes when someone finally goes ahead and calls Tony out to his face. ... The show and Tony alike turn a welcome corner--but it’s still impossible to tell how self-aware this evolution is on Gervais’ part.

After Life plays like an odd vanity project.

Kudos to Gervais for trying something contextually different from his past TV work, but all the pieces don’t quite fit together in this puzzle.

Gervais’s sharply honed comedic timing and delivery are undeniable, even when he’s working with such tiresome or obvious material as this. ... Still, the cumulative effect of these interactions and the countless others in which Tony berates or belittles the people in his life is ultimately numbing.

Watching a man go from awful human being to just decent human being isn't fun television. Fortunately it's only six half-hour episodes.

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.