I didn't know about After Life but it actually looks decent. I might check it out.
The sad thing to me about most of Ricky Gervais post, eh, shall we say An Idiot Abroad, isn't the smugness as such but how predictable and past it he's become. It happens to a lot of artists in fairness; most of them never have any drive to evolve and become defined by specific material, but there's something especially sad about comedians that live long enough to see themselves become the villain. That Netflix standup he got a billion dollars for making was straight-up painful to watch for instance. Two hours worth of transphobic jokes from an old bloke "who's just asking questions", and the only even remotely good one was about how Caitlyn Jenner still doesn't know how to drive.
I watched that one with a couple of friends who are pretty oblivious and just wanted to see it because they loved his old stuff, and afterwards one of them commented that it felt like an episode of The Office but not intentionally. I loved that description. It's like Gervais went around the bend and literally turned into David Brent in real life: losing weight and straightening teeth and wearing black slim fit in a desperate attempt to pose as a 20 year younger guy, but still stuck on the same old hangups and observations. Only he has burned all his good material at this stage and alienated himself from all his friends, so all he's left with quoting Twitter fights (which goes on for like an hour) and musing about how offensive his language is. Same thing with his show Derek when you think about it. It was literally him going full retard. He made an entire show about a character that felt like something he himself might have used as an example of shit tv in an Extras episode a decade earlier.
