After Life: Netflix Review

After Life: Netflix Review

Watching Ricky Gervais' new series After Life, there's a deepening sense of isolation and low-level anger over its six episode run.

But as the series develops, the acid edges Gervais' Tony has start to soften, as the show starts to wrap itself around the complicated edges of grief, denial and anger.

Tony's had a happy life - 25 years with his wife, before breast cancer stole her. Episode two of the show starts with a stark image, rife in its honesty, as Tony offers up a razor to his wrists in the bath to rid himself of the wretchedness he feels.

Yet, he's stopped from doing so, not by a revelation or epiphany - it's the fact his dog comes into the bathroom, reminding him that she needs feeding. It's this moment of frank honesty, which reveals much about what After Life is trying to do. Something banal needs doing - and that pulls him off the ledge.

Admittedly, the first episode makes Tony a tough character to empathise with or even begin to love.

Sure, he's got the trademark Gervais laugh in flashbacks with Tony and his wife Lisa, but this sallow, slumped man of now is not what you'd expect from a character on screen these days - flashes of malice line some of the barbs, others are just him lashing out in frustration, blackly hitting targets you'd not expect - and delivering c-bombs aplenty in the first outing to make you question the second's necessity for viewing.

However, what Gervais does is remarkable in some ways - but disappointingly, it won't be for everyone - even though we'll all be afflicted by what it's tackling.

It's a study of grief admittedly, but it's also a study of how people react to grief - from the person in the maelstrom to those on the outskirts who try to tackle what's best for their friend.

Bathed in veracity, a conversation with his nephew two-thirds of the way into episode two reveals much. Sure, it's Gervais' trademark atheism writ large, but when the nephew asks why the doctors couldn't save Lisa, Tony says the words without realising, confessing that they tried all they could. It's a flailing bitterness in the wind moment, a moment that speaks to the psyche of those of us in grief - that sometimes, you don't win; sometimes, you don't get the ending you wanted - but sometimes, honesty is what counts.

It's the moments like this in After Life which count; cut through the bleakness like life smashes through dreams. And while Gervais still delivers some bittersweet laughs with Tony's frustrations against the endless inanities of the idiocy of those he works with at his local paper, it's once the sound and fury of the anger subsides, that you see the honesty of the work and bittersweet beauty of it within.