I suppose the question is really: what do you do after redefining comedy for your era? After The Office, that exquisitely observed, agonising, heartbreaking, hilarious examination of the human condition co-created with Stephen Merchant, Ricky Gervais managed Extras – off-peak but still great – and then continued a downward trajectory that his latest offering, Alley Cats, does nothing to arrest.
You can see what the six-episode animated series about a gang of homeless cats wants to be. It wants to be an exquisitely observed, agonising, heartbreaking, hilarious examination of the human condition. But it can’t be bothered. Easier by far, especially as it’s on Netflix and unshackled from mainstream broadcasters’ rules about swearing, to call everyone a C-word and sigh at the inevitability/sweet release of death every five minutes. Nihilism – gotcha! So dark, man, so edgy!
Gervais plays Gus, the corpulent, complacent (“I’m probably the best cat in the neighbourhood”) misanthropy-maxxing leader of the ragtag group. His right-hand man, Fang (Andrew Brooke) is the gang’s bruiser and not much beyond that and Puke (David Earl) is the disgusting one, providing the lads with all the material they require about anal sex, fingering and the varying states in which genitals can be found. A regular visitor to their squat is the cat they call “Ponce” (Tom Basden) – real name Rupert (of course) – who is a pedigree, lives with a family, enjoys regular meals, brushing and puddings (“You fucking ponce!”). He has also, of course, been neutered, which fills in the joke-gaps left when the anal sex/fingering/genitals stuff runs out. Ponce himself remains unbothered by his testicular lack. “They cloud the judgment,” he explains serenely, in one of the handful of lines that could raise a smile rather than a weary checking of how long is left.
But, for now, we’re in the dark alley with these cats, plus the girl who lives upstairs – Olive (Diane Morgan), who is, Gus notes with glee, really thick. In a further sign of the laziness of the whole endeavour, though, she’s not. After a few token tries to establish her as such, she simply becomes a perfectly ordinary cat (it would also, it seems, have been too much effort even to make her a smart cat they only think is stupid), with a bit of a thing for Ponce until she finds out he doesn’t have the urge or the equipment to provide her with the kittens she wants.
Into the mix is brought a lost kitten, Kitten (Jo Hartley), who – I am sorry to tell you – awakens fatherly instincts in Gus and begins to teach him and the rest of the gang about love and what it means to be a family. Gervais the sentimentalist is always a far more unnerving proposition than Gervais the misanthrope, so you are best advised to approach Kitten’s scenes with the utmost caution. There are several in which Gus has to comfort Kitten, who has not yet mastered the cool nihilism thing, about the fact of death. “I don’t want to not exist. I want to live for ever!”, says Kitten. Gus replies – and I think here we are aiming for “tenderly and awkwardly” – that although a cat may no longer be around physically, he “lives on in the memories of friends and family”. Kitten brightens. “So you’ll live on through all the things you’ve taught me!” And lo, Gus himself is comforted. The viewer – for whom this is an entirely unearned attempt at an emotional beat because Gus has not yet taught Kitten a single, solitary thing – is not.
On we go, through an equally unmoving death of Gus’s mother, innumerable diatribes about obvious targets like spiders (“Maybe it’s the eight fucking legs and10 fucking eyes the cunts have got!” “Fucking shit creatures, mate!”), lengthy descriptions of Puke’s baroque proclivities that are usually a way of Gervais trying to engineer some kind of controversy (one involves Aids monkey rape that I’m honestly too tired to detail further).
There are a handful of moments in which you can see, maybe, what might have been. Gus in front of his love interest Lara (Kerry Godliman) has echoes of David Brent’s eternal vulnerability and evokes memories of Gervais’s talent for a kind of compassionate skewering of male frailties. Ponce provides some moments of relative subtlety (“And where is that in the league tables?” he enquires politely after Gus and Fang’s lauding of the university of life. “Quite low, I’d imagine”) and some shelter from the hail of uninventive swears and pointless rants. But otherwise Alley Cats feels like a creative cul de sac, leaving you not consumed by laughter but the wish that Gervais could stop indulging himself in lesser projects, go away, rest up and let his genius ferment once more, however long it takes. We’ll wait.
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