After Life is Ricky Gervais' sermon on the meaning of life, and it's as saccharine as that subject could possibly be. Derek was also fairly saccharine, and it was that element of it that left a bad taste in people's mouth, but I liked Derek because it was about some things and some people who are very rarely written about. Nothing in After Life hasn't been written about before--and most of it written before by Ricky Gervais himself.
The worst episode is the final one in which Ricky sits you down and tells you exactly what you were supposed to have learned from watching the series. There is no room for interpretation, and interpretation is how the audience interacts with the art. It's like if Bernard Shaw hadn't let his audience go home until he read to them the essays he appended to his plays when he published them.
I was wondering if I would have felt differently about this show if I hadn't already seen Gervais' other comedies. There's a scene in a pub where he is annoyed by a man who is eating crisps too loudly. I had already that routine with soup in Extras. There were also some lines in which he fights a straw man in a religious argument which i was quite certain I'd seen before, though i couldn't as easily place my finger upon it--perhaps it is more appropriate in this film about death than in its original place (although writers need to learn that weak opponents and easily won arguments fail to show off the cleverness of the protagonists and are easily forgotten). There was one good idea, and that was the resolution to the child bully story. I hadn't seen that before and thought it was a good idea that might work. I also very much enjoyed the actress who played the prostitute, although the ongoing joke about whether she should be called a prostitute or a sex worker felt about ten years old.
The worst episode is the final one in which Ricky sits you down and tells you exactly what you were supposed to have learned from watching the series. There is no room for interpretation, and interpretation is how the audience interacts with the art. It's like if Bernard Shaw hadn't let his audience go home until he read to them the essays he appended to his plays when he published them.
I was wondering if I would have felt differently about this show if I hadn't already seen Gervais' other comedies. There's a scene in a pub where he is annoyed by a man who is eating crisps too loudly. I had already that routine with soup in Extras. There were also some lines in which he fights a straw man in a religious argument which i was quite certain I'd seen before, though i couldn't as easily place my finger upon it--perhaps it is more appropriate in this film about death than in its original place (although writers need to learn that weak opponents and easily won arguments fail to show off the cleverness of the protagonists and are easily forgotten). There was one good idea, and that was the resolution to the child bully story. I hadn't seen that before and thought it was a good idea that might work. I also very much enjoyed the actress who played the prostitute, although the ongoing joke about whether she should be called a prostitute or a sex worker felt about ten years old.