Ricky Gervais in Netflix original series 'After Life'
Warning: The language here is brutally crude and unacceptable in many a social milieu.
Watching the trailer of Rick Gervais’s new Netflix series ‘After Life’ my faith in inventive profanity stands even more reinforced. Not that I needed any external convincing that inventive invective is a disregarded form of literature but it is good to know anyway.
‘After Life’, as described in its synopsis, is this: “Struggling to come to terms with his wife's death, a writer for a newspaper adopts a gruff new persona in an effort to push away those trying to help.” For me it was enough that Gervais’s character Tony is a newspaper writer—for The Tambury Gazette—even though it is, as he says, a free local newspaper that no one cares about. Anything about a newspaper or a print journalist and I am in.
Two scenes caught my particular attention and both contain extremely unvarnished language that only the Brits could carry off with élan. In one scene, a somewhat chubby school boy calls Tony a “pedo” to which Gervais’s character responds with ferocious invectitude. (Invectitude is not a word but I coined it because it sounds like it could and should be. It describes someone with attitude full of invective.)
““I am not a pedo, and if I was you’d be safe, you tubby little ginger cunt,” Tony tells the boy and walks off. Even watching it alone at 6.30 a.m. in my home office, I could hear a wave of wincing.
In another scene, a particularly hirsute man tells Gervais that his dog should be on leash, to which the latter describes him as “a hairy, nosy, cocksucker.”
Lest you think that ‘After Life’ is all inevctitude of a recently bereaved man, you would be wrong because it comes across as a rather insightful look at grief.
It releases on Netflix on March 8 and I plan to finish watching it that very day.
On a separate note, I find it remarkable that Gervais always plays Gervais irrespective of what character he is supposed play in any project. It takes a particular kind of professional self-assurance to do that successfully.