Jamie On the Box – After Life, The Walking Dead

TV Review: After Life and after death

Ricky Gervais’ new show on Netflix, and the season nine finale of The Walking Dead

You can trace a loose autobiographical line through most of Ricky Gervais’ TV characters, from the cauldron of arrogance, delusion and fragility bubbling away inside of David Brent, to the sudden success and equally-sudden disillusionment of Andy Millman, right through to the pain, bitterness, contempt and disdain of Tony, the main protagonist of Gervais’s new Netflix series After Life.

Tony used to be a fun-loving man. He was content to coast through his small-town life as a journalist on a bargain-bin newspaper, because he was lucky enough to be married to his best friend, Lisa, a woman who made his life feel complete and worth living. Since her untimely death, Tony’s lost all sense of purpose, and now the only thing stopping him from killing himself is the existence of his pet dog. He’s miserable and angry, and doesn’t just want the rest of the world to know it; he wants the rest of the world to feel it, too: his co-workers, his boss (who’s also his brother-in-law), his postman, the local sex-worker, the local heroin addict, his own father. All of them.

He doesn’t care whether he lives or dies any more, which makes him unpredictable, unpalatable and pretty much untouchable. He’s free to take up heroin, threaten school-children, tackle criminals and tell people openly and unabashedly exactly how he feels about them. Don’t worry, though. Like all of Gervais’s characters, there’s just enough humanity lingering in Tony to guarantee his eventual redemption – though I wouldn’t characterise it as deserved. His grief takes him to some pretty dark places, most worryingly to a suicide by proxy that lightly skirts the fringes of premeditated murder.

After Life, then, is something of a tonal mishmash. It’s A Wonderful Life meets Groundhog Day by way of Trainspotting. The comedy possesses elements of both the farcical, rage-filled wish-fulfillment of Curb Your Enthusiasm and the grotesque absurdities of The League of Gentlemen, with generous portions of Gervais’s own time-tested, world-weary shtick leveled into the mix.

Some of the situations are so cartoonish and the characters within them so buffoonish and broadly drawn that they seem painfully incongruous when set against the many scenes of real grief, sadness, depression and anger. Paul Kaye’s rubbish therapist and Diane Morgan’s dippy office worker (or Kath Pilkington, as I call her) in particular, while very funny characters, don’t feel ‘real’ enough to exist inside a show so pregnant with death, pathos, suicide and sorrow. Many of the characters seem like their only function is to be totems and stress balls dotted along the trail of Tony’s spiritual journey to redemption, a journey that culminates in a sickly-sweet ending that’s somehow just the wrong side of twee.

But do you know what? It works. It shouldn’t – and it sometimes threatens not to – but it holds together, much greater than the sum of its parts. It made me laugh – boy did it make me laugh – and it made me feel real, unbridled emotion, many, many times. While it’s true that Gervais populates Tony’s world with a legion of convenient idiots, Gervais is at his funniest when he’s tearing the world a new one, and meeting insanity with molten sarcasm – so who cares? His antics at the school gate, or in the cafe ordering a children’s meal, or trading caustic barbs with his workmates had me laughing so hard I could hardly breathe. On a few occasions I almost laughed and cried at the same time, especially when Tony visited his dear, demented dad at the nursing home to tell him he loved him.

Gervais doesn’t always exhibit tremendous range as an actor [I should clarify: as a comic actor, he’s terrific], but he’s surrounded himself with great talent here, exceptional actors who add range and depth to the show, and bring out the best in him. David Bradley does so much with so little as Tony’s dad; Penelope Wilton is exceptional as Anne, the widow with whom Tony strikes up a warm relationship through their regular trips to the cemetery; and Ashley Jensen brings grit and humanity to her all-too-brief role as the hard-working nurse who looks after Tony’s dad.

I don’t know what Gervais has in store for season two – now confirmed – but I’m looking forward to it. There’s definitely life after After Life.

Now we move from the dead, to the undead. The characters of AMC’s zombie juggernaut The Walking Dead spent the season nine finale walking through a winter wonderland, but instead of sleigh bells and snowmen, the emphasis was very much on hypothermia and zombies poking out of the snow to eat them. Most seasons of the show have ended with either a jaw-dropping cliff-hanger or some form of ultra-violent wrap-up, so it was a refreshing change for The Walking Dead to drop pace and close out with a quieter, more thoughtful coda. Since the big shock had already dropped in the penultimate episode (“Don’t tell him, Pike!”) there was time and room for mournfulness and soulfulness.

‘The Storm’, despite pitting our survivors against nature itself across a wide and deadly canvas, contained – amid the howling horror – a lot of strong character moments: Michonne made some tough calls, the freeze between the King and Queen kept deepening, Negan continued his evolution from deadly to cuddly, and a simple snow-ball fight made us feel all warm and fuzzy inside.

Aesthetically, ‘The Storm’ is radically different from anything the show’s attempted before; and it’s haunting, beautiful and horrifying in equal measure. Very apt, too. You can almost hear the words of Robert Frost’s snowy, death-tinged poem scoring the group’s slog through the unforgiving wilderness:

‘The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.’

With the exception of a messy stutter-step to accommodate Rick Grimes’ exit, The Walking Dead has been back on track this season, recapturing the ever-spiking, uneven hit-rate of its hey-day (which goes a little like this: two great episodes, two good episodes, three mediocre episodes and one awful episode, repeat, and not necessarily in that order).

While the show is still stitched through with that same wobbly mix of logic-defying decisions and plot-before-character (sometimes even cool-thing-happening-before-plot-AND-character), it’s managed to claw its way back out of the grave it found itself rotting in throughout its seventh and eighth seasons to become a show to be reckoned with once more. The whisperers have been terrific – if occasionally implausible – villains, injecting a welcome air of threat, unpredictability and menace back into the narrative.

It remains to be seen whether season nine will prove to have been the catalyst for the re-animation of The Walking Dead, or simply ‘one last scare’ before the final head-shot. For now, though, we can tip-toe ahead into apocalypse with a sense of cautious optimism.


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