Ricky Gervais’s new Netflix series Alley Cats has landed with a harsh review, and the response is blunt: the comedy did not make writer laugh once. The series, due on Netflix from Friday 7 August, turns a gang of stray cats into a sofa-bound set of gossipers in a derelict house.
Gervais voices Gus, a fat ginger tom who bellows ignorant or misanthropic opinions over everyone else. The review says the show is built around crude, offensive, shock-based humour, with jokes about weird sex with animals, fat people, blind cats and intellectual disabilities running through the episodes.
Gus, Ponce and Puke
Gus is not the only voice in the cast. Tom Basden voices Ponce, described as a pampered, middle-class pedigree who talks sense but is fatally undermined because he has no balls, while David Earl voices Puke, a mangy pervert with a penchant for inter-species sex. One line attributed to Puke — “I gave a hedgehog anal once” — tells you exactly how far the show pushes its material.
The review’s complaint is not just about taste. It argues that the series leans on the idea that cats are arseholes, a premise it says feels about 30 years old at a minimum. That matters because the joke engine is doing all the work here: if the central idea already feels worn out, the show has to depend on volume, filth and repetition to keep moving.
15-minute episodes, longer feel
The episodes run 15 minutes, but the review says the series feels much longer. That is a bad sign for a comedy built on brevity, because short-form writing usually survives on pace and payoff; here, the criticism is that sentiment appears in every episode and the material starts to circle itself.
Cat Stevens plays at the end, which is the review’s smallest mercy. Even that detail lands like a contrast rather than a rescue, because the rest of the piece treats the series as another swing from Gervais at provocation without the pace or precision needed to make it work.
Gervais and the backlash
The review also folds the series into the wider reaction to Gervais’s comedy, noting that some viewers blame woke politics for his decline while the writer says the real problem is simpler: the jokes are lazy, dated and not funny. That split is the useful takeaway for anyone watching this as an industry test, because it shows the argument around Gervais is no longer about offence alone but about whether the writing still lands.
Alley Cats arrives as a fresh Netflix release with a fixed date, a short runtime and a clear creative gamble. Based on this review, the immediate issue is not whether it is provocative enough; it is whether viewers will find enough actual comedy to justify 15 minutes, let alone a whole run.
