Ricky Gervais has addressed viewers who may get offended by his new sitcom Alley Cats, telling them: “You’re an adult.”
The comedian, 65, returned to Netflix with Alley Cats – his first TV comedy since After Life came to an end in 2022 – on Friday (7 August). The animated six-parter sees Gervais and regular collaborators Tom Basden, Andrew Brooke, David Earl and Diane Morgan voice a gang of foul-mouthed, stray felines as they attempt to help a lost kitten get home.
Since its releasem the comedy has received reviews ranging from lukewarm to scathing – with a number of outlets giving it one or two-star ratings. Many critics commented on its excessively sweary and crude dialogue, with The Independent’s Louis Chilton writing in his one-star review: “As TV premises go, ‘Dark Garfield’ is something that might have been transgressive 30 years ago – not today.”
Appearing to acknowledge the criticism, Gervais took to X on Friday morning. “If you watch Alley Cats and you get offended at any point, just remember that 1, It’s just a cartoon about cats, and 2, you’re an adult, and can take it,” he wrote on X, alongside an emoji of a face crying with laughter.
He also reshared The Times’s three-star review, which asked “Is Ricky Gervais’s sweary cat cartoon too much,” writing alongside it: “Hope so.”
As well as in The Independent’s review, which called the show “abrasive, smug, and completely mirthless”, Alleycats was also panned by The Telegraph’s Anita Singh – with the publication saying that it’s “the worst thing to happen to cats since Cats” in a zero-star write-up.
Metro’s Tom Percival went so far as to say that it is “the worst thing” he’s watched on TV that year and that it is “the televisual equivalent of a black hole of bad ideas”, while The Guardian’s Lucy Mangan wrote that its excellent cast “can’t save it from being lazy, crude and boring”.
After beginning his comedy career in the late Nineties, Gervais shot to stardom with his seminal mockumentary sitcom The Office in 2001. While the show only ran for two series, 15 international versions of The Office have since aired in other countries – with the US show starring Steve Carrell being the longest-running adaptation.
Gervais went on to create the podcast, The Ricky Gervais Show, as well as The Office spin-off film David Brent: Life of the Road, 2009 romcom The Invention of Lying, BBC sitcom Extras and more recently, Netflix’s After Life.
June marked the 25th anniversary of The Office, with stars Makenzie Crook and Martin Freeman taking part in a reunion documentary for the BBC. However, Gervais chose to give it a miss – opting to mark the occasion on his YouTube channel instead with a video looking back on the show’s biggest moments.
