After Life Season 1 (2019) Review

After Life Season 1 (2019) Review

 With the 2nd season of this show being released recently I thought I would go back and rewatch the first season of After Life and here is my review. The premise of the season sees a man become suicidal after the death of his wife going through and trying to find a reason to live. 

Main Character

This show was a personal project of Ricky Gervais with him starring, writing and directing and I thought he did a very good job. You can tell his passion for his character, and there is a nice development from the first episode to the last episode, he also has some really funny lines especially when he is being confrontational about things that we all think about but are too shy to say to people. You can tell he is a character in grieving and even though some things come across as abusive which i'll get to later he does a good job with the material andmakes you have sympathy for the character. 

Supporting Characters

This for me is a mixed bag, some of the characters are performed well such as Gervais' boss and his phsychiatrist but the problem was for me is that we never spend enough time with these characters to really care about them. Everything is shown through Gervais' character point of view so we find other characters irritating because he does and as none of them really have there own thing developed it hurts the characters, though the performers do decent jobs and try it is just the writing that hurts.

Story

The story is pretty emotional, you see this guy at the end of his rope in contrast to the majority of the other character characters are trying to help, it is a pretty predictable plot but I thought it was well done and even though it is predictable it is handled well enough. The main issue I have with the story is the amount of people that he comes across, it feels like there are too many people, plus it feels like there are times at the beginning of the season where Gevais is just abusive and mean to other characters for no real reason and it takes him from a griever to just an unlikeable person. 

Script

The script did make me laugh quite a bit, it's comedy is quite well handled. The drama is well executed and make you care about the main character and the story that he has throughout. However, I thought this show run into an issue, the script mentions suicide so much that it felt like Gervais was just postering and I never actually felt like he was actually going to commit Suicide. Then onto those scenes that come across as bullying and abusive, it just isn't a good look for the character and it harms the earlier parts of the show. 

Style

The style of the show is fine, it is paced really well at being 30 minutes long and 6 episodes it does enough to keep you interested without you getting bored or sick of it. I do feel like if the show wants to focus on more of the side characters in the future it would maybe either need longer episodes or a few more to get all the content in. The only thing about the style is that with everything beeing shown through our main protagonist it feels like every other character gets undercut when there was definitley potential for some interesting storytelling with some of the other players. 

Overall

Overall, I don't really get the hype for this show, it is a fine first season with a good lead performance and a dramatic story but the rest of the departments are a let down and I guess I just didn't get invested in the show enough, hopefully the 2nd season is an improvement for me. 

Rating - 6/10