Ricky Gervais Bets His Career on Alley Cats Forever

Ricky Gervais told fans he wants his Netflix cartoon Alley Cats to run until he dies, days after it hit number one in the UK. Critics scored it 38 on Metacritic. Netflix has not ordered season 2.

The six-episode Netflix comedy dropped on August 7. It is already the worst-reviewed show of his career, and the first one he has called the rest of his working life.

He Wants These Cats to Outlive Him

At the Annecy animation festival on June 25, Gervais turned 65, showed the first two episodes, and described the job in the simplest terms he had. No hair, no makeup, no dawn call. “The cats never get old. So as I get older and fatter, I can still sit in a chair and continue to make this forever,” he told the room, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

He had already said the same thing to the Mirror in July, before anyone had seen a finished episode. After the premiere he said it again on YouTube, this time to his own audience, and pushed the point past a gag.

It’s the first thing I’ve ever created that I’d like to go on forever. I can see myself just making this show till I die.

Ricky Gervais, YouTube, August 2026

He added that the cats will not age, and that it will not matter how fat, old and bald he gets. Someone can put him in a chair with a microphone, surrounded by the rest of the cast, “and off we go.” Senility, he said, would not matter much “as I’m usually talking bollocks anyway. It’s the dream job.”

That is the wager. After Life ended after three seasons. Stand-up specials come one at a time. Alley Cats is the format he has designed so the work can outlast his face, his back, and a shooting schedule. Netflix now has to decide whether it wants that show, or just the one week at the top of a chart.

A 38 Metascore Sat Next to a UK Number One

The critic pile-on was fast and public. Radio Times gave it one star. The Telegraph’s Anita Singh called it “staggeringly unfunny” and Metacritic logged that review as a zero. ScreenRant, tallying Rotten Tomatoes, said the Tomatometer made Alley Cats Gervais’s worst-reviewed series, worse than Derek at 60 percent and Life’s Too Short at 53 percent.

The season page on Rotten Tomatoes has since sat in the low 20s, most recently at 24 percent. Metacritic, which has 13 critic reviews on file, is the sturdier snapshot: a Metascore of 38, labelled generally unfavourable, with only two of those reviews in the green.

Gervais treated the chart as the reply. On August 9 The Independent reported he had posted “Oh. My. God.” on Instagram next to a screenshot of the UK number one slot, and said he had “never been so happy.” Radio Times recorded the same thanks to “the best fans in the world” on X. The Mirror later quoted him saying the fan response made him feel “like crying,” and that he has “had a few number ones.”

HuffPost UK, writing once the first surge had cooled, had the title down at number four in Britain, behind new episodes of My Life With the Walter Boys and documentaries on Charles Manson and José Mourinho. Netflix still had not spoken.

The audience numbers on review sites do not match the “fans versus critics” story either. Metacritic’s user score is 2.9 from 58 ratings, with 69 percent negative. Rotten Tomatoes audience figures have been warmer, in the high 50s to mid 60s depending on the day you look. A UK number one measures who pressed play. It does not measure who thought the jokes worked.

The craft complaint, once you read past the culture-war posts, is narrower than outrage. It is repetition. The insults settle into a loop, then each short episode swerves into a sincere close that a lot of viewers do not feel has been earned. Radio Times, the Telegraph, Empire and The Hollywood Reporter all filed pans. That is not a single blog pile-on. It is the British and American trades saying the writing is thin.

How Alley Cats Was Built to Run Forever

The production is the other half of the bet. Gervais did not make a cartoon the usual way, with storyboards first and actors last. He pitched a sitcom about swear-y cats to Netflix, then built it like a radio comedy that someone would later have to draw.

On Netflix Tudum he said his girl tabby-tortoiseshell, Pickle, is part of Gus, the lazy ginger tom he voices. “The rest of Gus is probably me, a fat bloke on the sofa watching telly.” Variety, at the 2025 first look, carried his other self-portrait: “I play a fat, lazy, rude, opinionated creature with fangs, who’s not as smart or brave as he thinks he is. So quite a stretch.”

Each episode runs about 15 minutes. Netflix lists episode one, Lost, at 17 minutes: Gus and the gang go to a cemetery to hunt mice and find a lost kitten. The official tagline is “Nine lives, zero fucks.”

https://x.com/rickygervais/status/2069047447460978698

He told Tudum he wanted the cats unwanted on purpose, “to add to the pathos and the jeopardy,” and to set a posh house cat among hungry strays like a British class sitcom. The models he named were The Phil Silvers Show, Cheers, Porridge and Only Fools and Horses. “It’s not surreal apart from the fact these cats talk. I’ve tried to make it quite naturalistic.”

1. September 2023: Gervais later said he found original sketches from this month, and that the gap to screen felt “mental.”
2. September 11, 2025: Netflix unveiled the show for a 2026 launch, with Gervais creating, writing, co-directing and voicing Gus.
3. June 25, 2026: He screens two episodes at Annecy, turns 65, and tells the festival he can make this forever.
4. August 7, 2026: All six episodes land on Netflix as a TV-MA comedy.
5. August 9, 2026: He celebrates the UK number one slot while the reviews are still coming in.

Animation Magazine, in an interview before launch, said Blink Industries won the contract after a tiny sample, “like, 20 seconds worth.” Gervais then wrote all six episodes and recorded them with the actors in the same room at the same time, before a frame was drawn. That is the opposite of most animation, and it is also the thing that makes a second season logistically easy for him and expensive for the people with pencils.

He told the Annecy crowd, “Don’t do cartoon voices. Talk as you normally do.” He told Tudum he hands the tapes over with a blunt instruction: “Animate what’s happening. Don’t add to the joke.” Because the cast recorded together, the show keeps real laughs. “It’s funny when you see a cat laughing in the background. Nothing happens by mistake in animation.” Every corpsing line still has to be drawn.

The After Life Deal Netflix Already Signed

Netflix has already seen this movie with Gervais, minus the fur. After Life was a critic-splitter that the streamer kept going anyway. Rotten Tomatoes now lists season 2 at 79 percent and season 3, which arrived in January 2022, at 64 percent. The show still ran three seasons, and Gervais closed it on his own timetable.

On May 6, 2020, Variety reported After Life’s third-season renewal in the same breath as an overall Netflix deal covering scripted series and stand-up. That order came less than two weeks after season 2 launched. It was, as the After Life record later noted, the first time a Gervais fiction series had gone past two runs.

When Netflix showed Alley Cats in 2025, AV Club treated that overall deal as still in force, and listed the rest of the account: the film Special Correspondents, then the specials Humanity, SuperNature and Armageddon, the last of which won a Golden Globe and a Guinness mark for the highest-grossing single stand-up date. His Mortality tour was already lined up for the same platform.

That history is why a 38 Metascore does not settle the question. Netflix has renewed him when the audience showed up, and it has used him as a stand-up house brand for eight years. Alley Cats is shorter than After Life, cheaper to shoot for the star, and harder to make for the studio. The streamer’s own record says the reviews are not the whole test. It does not say a cartoon with a 2.9 user score gets a free pass.

Someone Still Has to Draw the Next Season

If Gervais sits in the chair forever, other people have to keep coming back. The voice company is mostly the After Life and Derek gang, recorded as a group so they can interrupt each other. Co-director Elliot Dear came from a Love, Death and Robots episode. The drawings are Blink Industries adult animation, the London studio behind Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared and Dead End: Paranormal Park, with Tang Heng (Kung Fu Panda) as production designer. Metacritic lists Derek Productions, Shush Creative, Blink and Netflix Animation as the companies on the title.

Tudum names the gang that would have to reassemble.

• Gus: Gervais as the curmudgeon tom, part Pickle and part “fat bloke on the sofa,” alleged tough guy of the crew.
• Fang: Andrew Brooke as the chaotic tuxedo cat.
• Puke: David Earl as the shameless fleabag, the part several viewers already say steals scenes.
• Olive: Diane Morgan as the dim stray, another After Life regular back on the mic.
• Ponce: Tom Basden as the dapper domestic, the middle-class pet Gervais planted to start the class row.
• Kitten: Jo Hartley as the lost cat trying to get home, the plot engine of episode one.

Kerry Godliman, Natalie Cassidy and Tony Way are also in the voice cast. Gervais exec-produces through Derek Productions with Steven Hamilton Shaw of Shush Creative. For him the next season is a microphone. For Blink it is another six episodes of 2D on a show whose creator has already said he does not want an ending.

He told Tudum he wanted people “to love the cats,” and that the stories should surprise. He also said the show is existential because cats “know they haven’t got long.” That is the odd hinge of the bet. The characters are written as short-lived. The production is written as endless.

Will Netflix Order Alley Cats Season 2?

Netflix has not confirmed Alley Cats season 2. Gervais has said, more than once, that he wants the cartoon to continue until he dies, and the streamer has previously renewed his work fast when the audience showed up. That is the whole public record as of August 20. Everything else is inference from a UK number one, a 38 Metascore, and a format built for reruns.

WHAT WE KNOW

• The order: Netflix has not confirmed or denied more episodes, which is the same silence HuffPost UK reported last week.
• The chart: The show reached number one in the UK in its first days, then slipped; HuffPost had it at number four behind Walter Boys, Manson and Mourinho.
• The scores: Metacritic’s critic average is 38 from 13 reviews; its user average is 2.9 from 58 ratings.
• The pitch: Gervais has repeated the forever line at Annecy, in the Mirror, and on YouTube after launch.

WHAT IS UNCONFIRMED

• A second season: No episode count, no date, no internal Netflix leak has been verified.

Global hours: Tracker pages exist, but no clean worldwide hours figure has been published in a form that can be cited.

• The overall deal: The 2020 Netflix pact is public; whether Alley Cats is already covered by it has not been spelled out.

This week the argument on X had already jumped from the jokes to whether Gervais is finished. GB News ran a headline on August 18 about retirement calls in the backlash. On August 19 he posted a laughing emoji, and people underneath were already treating a second season as the thing that would prove the obituaries wrong. That is a lot of weight for six short episodes about cats in an empty flat.

He still has the chair, the old cast in one room, and a studio that already knows the faces. Netflix still has the only yes that counts.