Ricky Gervais Wants Alley Cats to Run Until He Dies

Ricky Gervais wants Alley Cats to run until he dies, but Netflix has not ordered a second season after a 1.5 million-view debut. The six-episode cartoon went out worldwide on 7 August 2026, topped the UK chart inside a weekend, and then slipped off the streamer’s own published global list.

He called that UK screenshot the happiest he had ever been. The same week, Netflix’s English TV chart put the show ninth, behind true-crime runs and a teen soap that drew six times the views.

The First Show Gervais Wants to Make Forever

Alley Cats is a British adult sitcom about feral London cats, written and directed by Gervais with co-director Elliot Dear. He voices Gus, a lazy, overweight bengal who leads a gang through churchyards, playgrounds and the odd funeral. Tom Basden, Andrew Brooke, David Earl, Kerry Godliman, Jo Hartley, Diane Morgan, Natalie Cassidy and Tony Way fill out the alley, many of them carried over from After Life.

Gervais has ended his live-action sitcoms on his own timetable. The Office and Extras stopped after two series and a Christmas special. After Life stopped after three. This one, he has said, is different, because the cats do not age and the work is a chair and a microphone.

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, creator, in a post-premiere video

He said the rest of the pitch in the same breath: put him in a chair with a microphone, surround him with the cast, and keep going even when senility kicks in, because he is “usually talking bollocks anyway.”

At the Annecy festival on 25 June, his 65th birthday, he told a packed 1,400-seat theatre that Netflix bought the show on a one-line brief. There are cats and they swear a lot. What happens? Nothing happens. He said he wanted a second season in the same answer, and he called the result a sitcom, not “adult animation,” because it is a family of cats sitting on a couch, watching TV, doing almost nothing.

A 24 Percent Score and a Zero-Star Review

Critics did not buy the forever-job framing. Rotten Tomatoes lists 24 percent of 17 reviews as positive, with a 3.3 average out of 10, the lowest score of any Gervais series. Metacritic’s 13-review tally sits at 38, labelled generally unfavourable: two positive, six mixed, five negative.

GERVAIS SERIES TOMATOMETER SCORES

Anita Singh gave the show zero stars and called it the worst thing to happen to cats since Cats. Louis Chilton scored it one out of five and asked what Gervais really thinks of it. Lucy Mangan gave two stars and wrote that it was “lazy, crude and boring.” Carol Midgley, one of the few warmer notices, landed at six out of ten and said it is funnier when it stops being juvenile. John Anderson, scoring 80, still opened by warning that the vulgarity could make a TV critic blush, then granted that each episode ends on some nod to basic decency.

The first episode, “Lost,” is the specimen those notices keep circling. Gus, Fang and Puke hunt mice in a churchyard, watch a funeral, talk about how they want to die, then meet a lost kitten. A friend, Ralfy, is hit by a car. Gus has to explain death. That is the show in 15 minutes: a dirty joke, a dead cat, a sermon about kindness.

Audience scores did not rescue it in a straight line. IMDb has the series at 6.9 from 7,300 ratings, a milder shrug than the printed pans. The people who finish the six episodes are not a bloc. Some come out calling it beautiful. Others treat the same hour and a half as proof that the man who made The Office is now recycling old radio observations and calling it a cartoon.

Netflix Counted 1.5 Million Views, Then Silence

Gervais posted a screenshot of the UK chart, wrote “Oh. My. God,” and said he had never been so happy, crediting the best fans in the world. Daily lists in other territories moved the title around the top ten in its first days, and it brushed the US chart at No. 7 before dropping off.

Netflix’s own weekly accounting is the number that will decide a pickup, and it is smaller than that screenshot. For the week of 3 to 9 August, Tudum placed Alley Cats at No. 9 in English TV with 1.5 million views in week one. My Life With the Walter Boys season 3, second on the same list, drew 9 million views, six times as many. The Idaho Murders documentary held first with 10.6 million. The film list that week was led by The Last House at 27.5 million.

THE FIRST-WEEK ENGLISH TV LIST

• Idaho Murders: 10.6 million views, week two of the title.
• Walter Boys season 3: 9 million views in its first week.
• Alley Cats season 1: 1.5 million views, No. 9, then gone from later weekly tens.
• Runtime problem: six episodes of 15 to 17 minutes, about 90 to 102 minutes in total, so the view count is a short sitcom measured against hour-long soaps and docs.

Later published weeks, through 30 August, do not list the show at all. A UK number-one tile can still be a local event. The global list is what the company prints, and it printed a ninth-place finish and then moved on.

After Life Still Shows How This Pickup Works

Gervais already has a Netflix loyalty contract, and it was written in public. After Life arrived on 8 March 2019 to mixed notices and a warm audience, and the streamer ordered a second season on 3 April, 26 days later. A third season followed, the first time a Gervais fiction series had gone beyond two. Radio Times readers later voted it the best comedy of modern times, even as season 3’s critic score slid to 62 percent.

Today is 2 September 2026, 26 days after Alley Cats dropped. There is no pickup note.

TWO NETFLIX PICKUP CLOCKS

1. 8 March 2019: After Life season 1 premieres on Netflix.
2. 3 April 2019: the streamer orders six more episodes, 26 days after launch.
3. 7 August 2026: Alley Cats season 1, six episodes, lands in full.
4. 11 August 2026: Tudum records 1.5 million views and a No. 9 English TV rank.
5. 2 September 2026: 26 days on, Netflix has not said yes or no.

After Life was a live-action half-hour with a grief hook and a town full of returning faces. Alley Cats is cheaper to continue on paper, and thinner in the one metric Netflix now publishes. The precedent cuts both ways. The company has renewed Gervais through a critic split before. It has also seen this new show fail to hold a weekly slot after one round of numbers.

A Whole Cast in One Room for 15 Minutes

The production is built for exactly the forever job Gervais described. Derek Productions and Shush Creative, the latter run by Steven Hamilton Shaw, made the series with Blink Industries. The London studio that animated the series is the same shop behind Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared and Netflix’s Dead End: Paranormal Park, a 51-to-200-person outfit in Holloway. James Stevenson Bretton and Ben Lole executive produced for Blink. Hugo Donkin produced. Tang Heng designed. Andy Burrows scored. John Derderian, Netflix’s vice president of animation series, called the voice lineup the Avengers of British comedy.

Gervais refused the usual one-actor booth. He put the whole cast in a room, ran each episode as a group, and told them not to “be funny.” Think of the cats as people on a sofa. The first episode generated one hour and 40 minutes of tape for a finished 15 minutes. Diane Morgan, who voices Gus’s dim half-sister Olive, said David Earl did a lot of the “heavy lifting” on the worst jokes, and that they kept stopping to ask whether a line could air. Morgan also said the tonal trick is the point: you think it is sweary cats, then he “thrusts a knife into your heart.”

HOW THE FIRST SEASON WAS BUILT

• The order: one season of six episodes, not the multi-season lock Netflix sometimes gives adult animation.
• The method: full-cast room sessions, then a cut down to 15 to 17 minutes, with Gervais and Dear directing.
• The music: Cat Stevens, Coldplay, Van Halen, and The Smiths’ There Is a Light That Never Goes Out, cleared after Gervais wrote to Morrissey and Johnny Marr; Marr gave his fee to an animal charity.
• The plot engine: a lost kitten, a dying mother, a cemetery date, a bee sting, and a last dance, with death written in “on purpose” so viewers would want the cats to survive.

That is a show you can make again without locations, aging makeup, or a 40-day shoot. It is also a show whose entire first season is shorter than a lot of feature films, which is why 1.5 million views can look like a hit in a UK tile and a footnote on a global hours list.

Does a Fawlty Towers Blessing Change the Math?

On 9 August, John Cleese posted that “The Ricky Gervaise CATS animation is quite wonderful,” misspelling the surname and ignoring the reviews. Gervais wrote back that the praise meant a lot, coming from the creator of the greatest British sitcom of all time. Cleese added, in a second note, “Brilliant. Really, really funny.”

A Fawlty Towers blessing is catnip for Gervais’s audience and useless as a greenlight. The night before launch he had already posted a last clip and asked people to be ready. Replies under that clip did not wait for critics. They measured the footage against The Office and called it a drop-off, a pile of recycled observations, the opposite of whetting an appetite. A month later the argument has not moved. Some people still finish the season and thank him. Some call it a reason to look at the subscription.

Bees, sausages and Schindler's List.

ALLEY CATS, now playing on Netflix. pic.twitter.com/zLYPItfQEc

— Ricky Gervais (@rickygervais) August 7, 2026

He had tried to set the terms on the day it dropped, posting about bees, sausages and Schindler’s List, and earlier telling anyone offended to remember it is a cartoon and they are adults. The disclaimer in the official interviews was blunter: do not be offended by what these characters say, they cannot help it, they are cats. The people who hated it did not describe offence so much as boredom. Cheap-looking animation. Unearned final-act sweetness. Jokes that sit where a scene should be.

Netflix Has Not Said Yes to More Cats

The six episodes still sitting on Netflix are the whole order. Unlike some adult cartoons on the service, there was no upfront stack of extra seasons. Gervais said at Annecy that viewership would decide the rest, then spent the rollout lobbying in the open, praising the company because he wants more.

WHAT WE KNOW

• The order: one season, six episodes, released together on 7 August 2026.
• The published tally: 1.5 million views and No. 9 in English TV for the first measured week.
• The UK spike: a number-one tile Gervais himself treated as the last word.
• The critic stack: 24 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, 38 on Metacritic, zero stars in at least one print review.

WHAT IS UNCONFIRMED

• Season 2: Netflix has not greenlit or cancelled further episodes.
• Completion: the company has not published how many of those 1.5 million views watched all six.
• A new deal: no statement on whether the After Life relationship now extends to an open-ended cartoon.

He already described the working life he wants: a chair, a microphone, the same friends, cats who never get old. Netflix has the first 90 minutes, a UK victory screenshot, a ninth-place global week, and a pile of one-star notices. Twenty-six days after After Life launched, the company had already said yes. Twenty-six days after Alley Cats, it has said nothing.