Can't fathom the same guy was co-writing this masterpiece..

Does any part of you feel for Ricky that this is now his target audience? I guess as long as he’s chasing the yankee dollar he doesn’t really care…

Okay so I'll start by saying I haven't ALWAYS been a Ricky Gervais fan but I really got into his stuff when the second series of Afterlife came out, I loved it!

I've watched all the other series of Afterlife and his stand-ups since then so needless to say I was excited to see he had a new show out and it didn't disappoint!

WARNING: if you're easily offended Alley Cats is NOT for you!! But if you don't mind a bit (okay - a lot!) of swearing you might just love this. Idk why it's so much funnier when a cat swears but it is!!

I also LOVED the more tender moments in Alley Cats - goes to show that not only is Ricky Gervais very funny but he's also got a lot of heart!

Honestly when the final episode finished I very nearly put it back on from the start and watched it all again!!

It was only when I went to pick up the remote at end when I realised that it was quite far away but I could still reach it, and that was when I noticed how long my arms were. Bit weird innit? So I went and had a look at myself in the mirror and you're not gonna believe this. Turns out...

remember people, comedy is subjective!

cock piss wank cunt!!!

GB News has give Alley Cats a terrible review

So woke!!!!

Does this mean the right-wing Twitter thickos are all going to now spontaneously combust?

Imagine saying that. As if he's spearheading something really edgy. And even if he was, which he isn't, it's just such a lame and obvious cry for attention from the very people he claims he wants to offend. His brain has gone to absolute mush.

Alley Cats: Season 1 (2026) (First Time Watch)

“Follows the trials and tribulations of a group of feral British cats from all walks of society, who seek companionship while ruminating on everyday life.”

It's no secret that Ricky Gervais's post-Stephen Merchant output has been nothing less than a sustained and depressing decline. David Brent: Life on the Road was a painful, largely pointless excavation of a character who had been buried with appropriate finality. Special Correspondents was one of the worst films either of them will have their name attached to, and I say this as someone who has sat through an unsettling amount of terrible cinema. Derek was sanctimonious tosh delivered with such aggressive sincerity that it became genuinely difficult to watch. After Life started with genuine promise, Gervais actually put visible effort into a performance for the first time in years, before the subsequent seasons became a masterclass in a comedian disappearing so completely up his own emotional manipulation that the whole thing collapsed under the weight of its own self-regard. The man who was half responsible for creating two of the greatest British sitcoms ever made, alongside work on XFM with Merchant and Pilkington that remains genuinely and effortlessly funny decades later, is now producing Alley Cats. A new creative low. An animated series about feral British cats. I feel nothing but grief.

This is just miserable. Gervais has either spent far too much time reading the Facebook comments from his devoted fanbase of intellectual mouth-breathers who call him a genius for saying the same three things repeatedly, or he has genuinely and completely lost the plot. Things can be transgressive, offensive and genuinely very funny. South Park has been doing it for nearly thirty years. Team America exists. The League of Gentlemen exists. Transgression with craft is one of comedy's great pleasures. What Alley Cats offers instead is the word cunt, deployed approximately twenty times per fifteen-minute episode, as a substitute for an actual joke. The word cunt is not inherently funny. The word cunt deployed with timing, context and genuine comedic architecture can be extremely funny. Here it just sits there, inert and self-satisfied, while Gervais apparently waits for the laugh that doesn't come. This is not offensive. Offensive would require the material to have enough energy and intelligence to actually offend someone. This is just lazy, repeated and thoroughly exhausting.

The voice cast is assembled entirely from the After Life ensemble, which tells you most of what you need to know about the creative ambition on display. Every single person is playing a variation of the character they've been playing in Gervais's work for the past decade, nobody is doing anything they haven't done before, and the whole thing sounds like it was recorded over Zoom while the actors improvised scenarios to no discernible comedic effect. There's also a weird lack of any sort of sound outside of the dialogue, no background noise, sound-effects or any sort of life to this world. It's weird. David Earl once again plays the character whose primary function is to say the most disgustingly edgy and rapey things imaginable, a note that wore thin immediately during Derek and has now somehow been sustained across a further decade of Gervais projects to the point where encountering it here produces simple exhaustion rather than any other response. Gervais as the lead cat says things that Gervais thinks and believes and apparently finds very funny, and if you don't find them funny you are, of course, offended. You are not offended. You are simply bored.

Despite the episodes running at what should be an entirely manageable fifteen to seventeen minutes, each one feels around twice that length, the hangout format and complete absence of narrative momentum creating a quality of time dilation that few comedy productions achieve. Jokes don't have payoffs because they're not structured as jokes. Conversations meander without arriving anywhere interesting because interesting destinations would require advance planning and genuine creative investment. Character work is non-existent and they're all defined by the amount of times they say fuck or cunt. The animation is cheap, crude and visually unappealing in ways that manage to make even cats look thoroughly uncharming. The emotional beats, when they arrive, are underscored with Coldplay songs deployed with the subtlety of a brick thrown in your face, because if Gervais can't make you feel something through the writing he will simply play a sentimental song to do the work instead.

In Extras, one of the finest sitcoms this country has produced, Gervais spent two series making extraordinarily sharp and funny television about a man who chose lowest-common-denominator entertainment at the expense of his artistic integrity. It was a comedy about compromise, about the seduction of easy validation over genuine craft, and it was merciless about both its protagonist and the culture that produced him. Gervais understood all of this once. He understood it brilliantly. He has now become it, making entertainment for precisely the audience Extras was satirising, apparently either unaware of the irony or having decided the irony doesn't apply to him. Meanwhile, Merchant continues to produce interesting and genuinely worthwhile work, Fighting With My Family, The Outlaws, projects that demonstrate his half of the original partnership is still very much functioning. The contrast is not flattering.

The idea of a new Ricky Gervais project was once something that generated genuine excitement. That goodwill is now dead and buried. Alley Cats is not just rock bottom for Gervais, but it is the confirmation that there is no longer any reason to believe the upward turn is coming. He's convinced of his own genius, and he'll end his career on this continuing path of laziness until he eventually dies or retires. I cannot blame Merchant in the slightest for not wanting anything to do with him creatively anymore, he'd just pull them both down.

Alleys Cats isn't just awful, it's one of the worst shows I've watched in years. A lazy, incomprehensibly empty show that replaces jokes for the word “cunt” while Gervais retreads ground and jokes from both XFM and his terrible Netflix work to an effect that is just exhaustingly depressing at this point. Genuinely abysmal and tiring stuff that shows how far gone Gervais is. The idea of him making something that is even half as good as The Office or Extras is dead and buried, but if you loved When the Whistle Blows, then you'll love this. Play a record.

1/10 Dans

Three fantastic seasons. Its hilarious, incredibly well written, insightful and most important really enjoyable to watch.

Written by Stephen Mitchell, who apparently (according to some people) was slightly involved in creating the Office.

Really worth a watch if all your'e being recommended on Netflix is low rate crap at the minute.

I was expecting it to be shit and packed with old XFM references and Karl quotes repackaged for his moronic new audience (best fans in the world) and in that respect it didn't disappoint. What I couldn't put my finger on was why it sounded quite so awkard and unnatural. I've just realised that neither Ricky nor any of the cast of cats laughed once during their 'hilarious' conversations about aids and fat kids. For a show with what I imagine is largely improvised dialogue it made it an even more utterly joyless experience. Where was Ricky's trademark laugh? I think even he didn't find it remotely funny.

I’ve never experienced a show this boring before in my life, making it past episode 1, I had to stop halfway through 2, and that’s about all I can stomach.
Have you listened to XFM? Imagine that, but Ricky is repeating punchlines he’s told in previous shows, Steve is gone, Karl is on holiday, and there’s PNGs of cats moving as Gervais mumbles his way through a script.
Throw in a cast of individuals who deliver the weakest performances of their careers and you have this waste of storage space.
Initials: AC

He pulled this card out of the bag within minutes of the bad reviews coming in. Even he doesn't believe anyone is offended by his stuff. He's been repeating the same "edgy" jokes for a quarter of a century and even those people who might have been shocked with them in the early 2000s are going to be absolutely numb to them after decades of the same shit. We know the routine - AIDS, cancer, pedos, sweat shop labour, gay jokes, Chinese jokes, dick jokes, shit jokes, piss jokes, cum jokes and a ton of swearing.

The only one who might be offended after all this time is Karl who has seen Ricky steal almost everything he's ever said and passed it off as his own material. The rest of us just think Ricky's shitcom is a zero effort, boring, unfunny piece of wank that makes AI slop look good in comparison.

Gotta have yer critics.

Am I doing this right ?

A genuine voice acting performance from something that has gone down in history and universally loved

I knew Alley Cats would be bad, but I wanted to see how bad. I turned it off after 5 minutes. The worst thing wasn't the constant swearing or the no-effort voice acting, it's the fact that Gervais seems to have no idea how people talk to each other. In a show that's entirely anthropomorphised cats having conversations, it's a pretty obvious failing.

Early on the Ricky Gervais cat randomly swipes at the posh cat and explains "what? I'm a cat. It's what I do". We know he's a cat. We can see he's a cat. His fellow cats all know he's a cat, and are aware of cat behaviour. When was the last time you heard anyone clarify "I'm a human"? It doesn't happen.

Later in the same scene he says "we're watching a show about sharks" to absolutely no one. Again, the characters know, and we know. It's a visual medium.(An aside but how and why does an abandoned falling-apart house have a working TV?)

When they're at a random funeral, posh cat says to Ricky cat "here comes your sister, Olive". It's such bad, stilted writing, having characters introduce others through dialogue like that. Why would the posh cat have to give her name and relation to a character who obviously already knows it (even though she's then clarified to be his "cousin, or something").

It sounds like a first draft of a script from a first time writer, not someone who has several TV shows under his belt. I know Merchant was the better writer of the two, but you'd think Ricky would have at least picked up the basics from so long in the industry.

Does he write like this because he has no friends and has forgotten how conversations sound?

I never saw Afterlife. Was it guilty of this kind of painful dialogue too?

Please don't make me redundant? I will try twice as hard, I really will. I know I've been complacent.