After wrapping up his global stand-up comedy tour titled Humanity, Ricky Gervais is ready to get back to television. It was announced on Wednesday that Gervais is set to create, write, direct and star in Netflix’s comedy series After Life. The comedy will have six half-hour episodes with the release date still to be determined.
After Life will see Ricky Gervais starring as Tony, a man whose perfect life completely falls apart after the death of his beloved wife Lisa. After thinking about suicide, Tony decides to change his approach to life by speaking and doing whatever he wants. While he thinks of this change as some kind of “superpower,” people around him are trying their best to turn him back into the nice guy he was before.
Charlie Hanson, who worked with Gervais on projects like Derek, Extras, and David Brent: Life on the Road will join After Life as an executive producer.
This won’t be the first time Ricky Gervais collaborates with Netflix since the streaming service recently released a comedy-special based on Humanity, his first special in more than seven years. Humanity was a big success, which encouraged Netflix to buy the rights on the comedian’s upcoming stand-up special SuperNature.
#Humanity now streaming on Netflix pic.twitter.com/xcbxenxy7G
— Ricky Gervais (@rickygervais) March 30, 2018
After working on a couple of BBC’s shows as a writer, Ricky Gervais had his big breakthrough with mockumentary sitcom The Office which he created, directed, and starred in as David Brent. He then went on to create successful television series like Extras and Derek alongside movies The Invention of Lying, Cemetery Junction, and Special Correspondents. Among his other gigs, Gervais notably served as a Golden Globe Awards host from 2009 to 2011 and then again in 2016.
