The series I decided to watch and write about is After Life, a dark comedy written and directed by

Ricky Gervais which first premiered in March 2019. After Life stars Ricky Gervais as Tony, a British
journalist for the Tambury Gazette living in the fictional town of Tambury, England, who has
recently lost his wife to breast cancer. The show follows Tony as he deals with his wife’s death and
his interactions with the world around him while suffering from such a heavy loss.

Codes and Conventions of the genre

After Life is a dark comedy. Dark comedies are designed to make light or dark subjects. In After
Life, the core subjects that are frequently joked about include suicide and drugs. Dark comedies’
humour often comes from irony, the audience’s enjoyment of watching other people suffer and
awkward laughs produced by witnessing an awkward social situation.

Episode 3 begins with Tony shaking his head and asking a man ‘when did you notice it?’, asking the
man about the stain on his wallpaper. After the man replies, Tony nods, expressionless and bored,
and continues asking questions like ‘and when did you start to think it looks like Sir Kenneth
Branagh?’. This scene serves as a parody to an interrogation, something you might see in a crime
drama as a criminal interrogation, for example; this all creates irony and aims to amuse the
audience.

Themes and Political or Social issues

Grief, mental health issues, negative behaviour and a lack of social tact and consideration for
others’ feelings are a core part of Tony as a character, and thus are a main focus of the show.

Representation

Although I don’t personally believe this was done intentionally to say the themes and issues
presented in the show are exclusive to this group, the large majority of characters seen in the
series are middle-aged or elderly Caucasians. More importantly, people with many different
mental health problems are represented, and this is linked directly to the purpose of the series as
a whole.

Aside from ethnicity, many different kinds of people are represented in After Life, which I think is
part of the point of the show. The characters include a drug addict, a prostitute/sex worker, and a
father with extreme memory loss due to mental illness. This is an irregular group to have as
frequently used characters, but it shows that anyone can have problems. Some might think this is
just the case of the show starring a working-class cast, but Tony and his colleagues don’t appear to
be lower-class, so I believe the producers tried to have some diversity in terms of class.

Technical Aspects

Until episode 4, Tony gets to know Julian, a homeless drug addict who Tony connects with in a
sense because of their shared loss of their partners (Julian’s girlfriend died of an overdose) and
suicidal thoughts. Tony occasionally buys drugs from Julian. At the end of episode 4, Julian tells
Tony that he ‘would quite happily die right now’ if he had enough drugs to overdose. Tony gives
him enough money for this and before he leaves, Tony says to Julian “don’t waste it on food”. This
is ironic, as what one generally says to a homeless person would be ‘don’t waste this money on
drugs’.
Later in episode 3, Brian comes into the newspaper office and claims to have found one of Freddy
Mercury’s teeth. Tony asks ‘how do you know it’s Freddy Mercury’s tooth’. Brian snorts and says
‘look at the size of it mate’. Tony’s responses are delivered slower than Brian’s, emphasizing the
fact that Tony is tired of dealing with Brian, and Brian already has the whole story figured out in
his head, adding to the chemistry (or lack of) and comedic effect of the scene, and exaggerating
their character traits. In addition to Brian’s fast paced delivery of his lines, while he is on set he has
the majority of dialogue for that scene, as he has the most to say, once again exaggerating how
badly Brian wants to get one of his stories in the paper.

Mise en scene

In season 1 episode 3 of the series, there is a scene near the end where Tony goes to the beach
with his dog and has a flashback of being at that same beach with his wife, Lisa, when she was
alive. In the flashback, we see Lisa go to the water, and she asks Tony to join her. Tony refuses and
keeps filming her instead. We cut back to the present. The camera is behind Tony, his dog by his
side. He takes his jacket off and wades far out into the water, to the point where he is swimming. I
think this represents Tony swimming in his regrets, such as not joining Lisa in the same waters
back when she was still alive. As Tony swims away, we start to hear his dog barking, introducing
audio which is then used for a J-cut to a shot of the dog barking. We cut back to Tony and as his
head is about to be submerged in the water, he hears his dog barking and turns around, eventually
coming back to the shore. When seeing this, I realised just how essential Tony’s dog was to the
show. At this point, we had already seen Tony contemplating suicide in his bathtub in an earlier
episode, in which his dog came into the room, barked and asked for food, making Tony stop what
he is doing and get out of the bathtub to go feed the dog. An earlier, very similar instance of a
suicide attempt had been brought up by Tony before this happened too, where he stated ‘the look
on the dog’s face’ was what made him stop his suicide attempt. I believe the fact Tony’s bathtub
suicide attempt being in water was intentional and linked that scene to him swimming at the
beach in episode 3. Tony’s dog serves as his anchor; when he feels the most regretful or sorrowful
and is about to commit suicide, the dog stops him.

Conclusion

The point of the show in short: everyone who lashes out is hurting inside for a reason. The bully in
the schoolyard for example. Treating people with disrespect will make things worse, you should
treat even bullies nicely. Finding joy in the little things. Depressed people can spread unhappiness,
they need positivity and help to recover. They can think about only themselves, can only focus on
their own pain, they don’t think of others. As pointed out multiple times through episode 3.
Everyone has feelings, and everyone can be hurt by things that are said to them. As expressed by
the nurse in episode 3, she tells Tony his dad ‘still has feelings’ when Tony gets angry at his father
for not remembering Lisa’s death because of his memory loss, something which is no one’s fault.
She then goes on to compare Tony to a ‘Twitter troll’, and gets right to the point: “just because
you’re all upset, everyone else has to be upset”. Tony spreads his negativity and can’t stand to see
other people happy.

When Tony asks Roxy why she decided to go down the road of being a sex worker, she firstly
responds with ‘money’. This is perhaps an existentially inspired answer, speaking about how much
of people’s goals and motivations in life is fuelled by money. When Tony asks Roxy to be more
specific, she makes a joke about her being inspired by the film Pretty Woman, then starts another
line of conversation. In the end, Roxy couldn’t answer Tony’s question, most likely because she
doesn’t know the answer. The meaning of life is considered by most to be an unanswered
question for a reason; it is individual to everyone, and many people go through life without an
answer. They simply live their lives. Tony questions this because of his grief, having lost the source
of happiness in his life, Lisa.

Bibliography

IMDb. 2019. After Life (TV Series 2019– ) - Imdb. [online] Available at:
<https://www.imdb.com/title/tt8398600/>

En.wikipedia.org. n.d. After Life (TV Series). [online] Available at:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/After_Life_(TV_series)

Scottgodding.wordpress.com. n.d. Black Comedy Analysis. [online] Available at:

https://scottgodding.wordpress.com/black-comedy-analysis/

klsto (2016). Codes and Conventions of Comedy. [online] Slideshare. Available at:
https://www.slideshare.net/klsto/codes-and-conventions-of-comedy-60496681.