Alley Cats

Ricky Gervais has been making shows about the same kind of man for twenty five years. A man who talks too much and feels things too late. Alley Cats is the cleanest version of that idea he has made. It is also the funniest thing he has put on Netflix since After Life. The whole season is ninety minutes long. It should not hit this hard.

The setup is very simple. A group of feral British cats live behind the bins. They insult each other, they steal food, and they talk about humans all day. Gervais voices Gus, a fat orange tabby who thinks he is the smartest cat in the alley. He is not. Around him are Ponce, Puke, Fang and Olive. If you have watched any Gervais show before, you will know these voices right away.

Then a lost kitten shows up. She is looking for the home she came from. From that point on, the show becomes something else.

The jokes are hiding something

What makes this work is how fast it switches. One minute the cats are saying the rudest things Gervais has written in years. The next minute Gus is looking at the kitten, and the animators get that look exactly right. You realise the show has been setting you up the whole time.

It is the same trick as After Life. Sadness hidden inside rude jokes. But here it moves faster, because each episode only has fifteen minutes to work with.

Some people will say the show is too rude, and I understand that. A few jokes are there only to make you flinch. But if you stop there, you miss the point. These are animals with no home, no owner and no future. They fill the day with noise so they do not have to think about the fact that nobody is coming for them. The jokes are how they cope.

The animation is better than people are saying

Blink Industries did beautiful work here and nobody is talking about it enough. The 2D style looks rough and hand drawn, which suits an alley full of wet streets, orange street lights and full bins. But the character animation is doing the real emotional work. Gus's face carries the whole second half of the season.

The kitten is drawn with huge eyes, and the show knows how manipulative that is. That is why it holds back and only uses it when it counts. Tang Heng's design work makes the alley feel real and dirty, which is what stops the soft moments from feeling cheap. This is not a cute show that is also rude. It is a rude show with a heart, and the design understands the difference.

The only thing I would change

I want more of it. That is my only complaint, and it is not really a complaint. Six episodes of fifteen minutes is a small amount of show. The story about Gus's sick mother arrives late and moves fast. Olive is good enough to carry a full episode and never gets one. In a longer season, both of those would have room to breathe.

But none of that is a flaw in what is actually on screen. Every minute here works. The show is short because it was ordered short, not because it ran out of ideas, and I would rather have ninety perfect minutes than six hours of filler.

Most reviews have been much harder on this show than I am. The main complaints are the writing, the pacing and the shock jokes. I think those reviews stopped after two episodes, which is easy to do when the whole thing is shorter than a movie. Watch it to the end and you can see what it was building.