Ricky Gervais Has Nine Lives and Zero F***s in Alley Cats

Ricky Gervais has spent decades finding comedy in awkward offices, deluded actors, grief, friendship and the very worst parts of human behaviour. Now, he’s decided people are no longer enough. It’s time to unleash the cats.

Speaking at the Annecy International Animation Film Festival in June, Gervais introduced Alley Cats, his first animated sitcom and what may be the most natural extension of his comedy yet: a gang of foul-mouthed British cats roaming the streets, insulting each other and occasionally revealing that they have hearts beneath all that fur.

The six-part Netflix series is led by Gus, a chubby tabby voiced by Gervais himself. It’s a role that offers several immediate advantages. As he joked during the masterclass, “I don’t have to do hair and makeup.” Better still, animated cats don’t age, leaving Gervais free to continue voicing Gus regardless of what time does to the man behind the microphone.

“I could make this forever,” he said. Netflix executives may want to check exactly how many lives they have commissioned.

Gervais wrote and co-directed the series alongside Elliot Dear, whose previous work includes the memorable “All Through the House” episode of Netflix’s Love, Death & Robots. The voice cast is packed with familiar faces from the wider Gervais comedy universe, including Tom Basden, David Earl, Kerry Godliman and Diane Morgan, alongside Andrew Brooke and Jo Hartley.

Alley Cats wasn’t recorded like a conventional animated series. Rather than bringing each performer into the studio separately, the entire cast recorded together before any animation was created. That allowed them to interrupt, improvise and bounce insults around the room with the rhythm of a live-action sitcom.

Gervais also resisted the temptation to make everyone sound exaggeratedly feline. His instruction to the cast was simple: “Don’t do cartoon voices.” The aim was to make everything feel natural and recognisable, with the minor exception that all the characters happen to be talking cats.

That approach could give Alley Cats the loose, conversational energy that made The Office and Extras so distinctive. Gervais has always been at his funniest when characters sound as though they are speaking before their brains have approved the words. Moving that formula into animation gives him an entire new playground and removes the need for Gus to behave like a respectable member of society.

The tone is unmistakably Gervais: brutal put-downs, bad language, social observation and, somewhere beneath the claws, genuine sentiment. Netflix promises his familiar mixture of heart and social commentary. The tagline is rather less subtle: “Nine lives, zero fucks.”

With episodes running for a sharp 15 minutes, Alley Cats looks built for fast, chaotic bingeing. It arrives on Netflix on 7th August and if Gervais is right, Gus could be scratching around for years to come.