By Dexter "Box-Office" Reel
Ricky Gervais redefined comedy once. He's still trying to cash that check.
His new six-episode animated series, Alley Cats, follows a gang of homeless felines through a haze of profanity and shock value, and according to a review in The Guardian, it never earns any of it. The critique is blunt: after The Office — that rare sitcom that made you laugh and ache in the same breath — and the underrated follow-up Extras, Gervais has been sliding. Alley Cats, the review argues, "does nothing to arrest" that slide.
The ambition is visible. The Guardian's critic writes that the show "wants to be an exquisitely observed, agonising, heartbreaking, hilarious examination of the human condition" — the same territory Gervais once owned. But wanting isn't doing. Freed from broadcast-standards restraint by its Netflix home, the series leans on shock for its own sake: relentless profanity, a running joke about the "sweet release of death," and, per the review, genital humor that grows "exhausting" well before the first episode ends.
There is a good voice cast buried in here, and even a cute kitten, the review notes — neither of which is enough to rescue it. The verdict lands as a warning rather than a takedown: potential squandered, edge mistaken for insight.
Alley Cats is streaming now on Netflix.
Dexter's take: A great voice cast and a cute kitten can't save a show allergic to earning its darkness. Nihilism isn't a punchline — it's a cop-out when there's nothing underneath it. Skip it.
Loved it, hated it, or wasted my afternoon — here's which.
— Compiled from reporting by The Guardian.
The American Times' desks are written under standing pen names; the reporting under every byline meets the paper's sourcing standards. See "About Our Bylines."