The Premise
Ricky Gervais's first animated series, a six-episode "slacker sitcom" about a gang of feral British cats hanging around bins, alleys and back gardens, ruminating on death, sex and whether the neighbour will refill the food bowl. Gervais voices Gus, a chunky ginger who's the reluctant leader of the strays. The cast around him is the usual Gervais repertory company — David Earl, Diane Morgan, Kerry Godliman, Tom Basden, Jo Hartley — plus Natalie Cassidy and Tony Way. Animation is by Blink Industries, the London studio behind Don't Hug Me I'm Scared. The early episodes set up the alley, the pecking order, and a rotating cast of humans the cats observe with contempt. It dropped on Netflix in August 2026.
The Case For
Blink's animation is genuinely lovely. There's a scruffy, hand-drawn softness to the cats that undercuts the crudity of the dialogue in interesting ways, and the London backdrops have real texture. Diane Morgan can read a shopping list and get a laugh, and she gets a couple here. Earl and Godliman know the rhythm of a Gervais scene in their sleep. When the show slows down and lets the cats just sit and talk nonsense at each other, there's a low-key hangout charm that occasionally lands, closer to a stoned garden-shed chat than a punchline machine.
The Case Against
The writing is thin. Every character sounds like Ricky Gervais doing a voice, which means every conversation is Ricky Gervais arguing with himself about whether a joke was offensive. The shock beats — sex gags, disability gags, dead-mouse gags — are delivered with a smirk that assumes the transgression is the joke, and the show doesn't build anything underneath them. Pacing is slack in a way that reads less "confident hangout show" than "we had six half-hours to fill." The Hollywood Reporter clocked it as "rarely all that funny and only occasionally kind of moving." The Guardian called it "lazy, crude and boring." Both are right.
Who It's For, Who'll Bounce
If you're still on the Gervais bus post-Afterlife and you'll take a David Earl monologue in any packaging, there's an audience of one being catered to and you're in it. Fans of Blink's visual style will find things to like in freeze-frame. Everyone else bounces by episode two. If you wanted BoJack-level animal-sitcom writing, or the density of early Peep Show, or even the sweet melancholy of Flowers, this isn't in the neighbourhood. Closer comparison: a lesser Family Guy cutaway, stretched.
The Ruling
SLOP is the right call because the craft isn't there. The show keeps stopping so a character can voice an opinion Gervais has voiced in seventeen interviews, and the plot waits politely for him to finish. That's the Lecture Test failing in both directions — the "am I allowed to say that" routine is itself a sermon, delivered by a cartoon cat instead of a stand-up mic, and the scripts pause for applause that never comes. Scenes don't escalate, they idle. Jokes don't build, they get restated. The animators are doing more work than the writers, which is the tell. When a six-episode season with this cast, this budget and this studio produces something a Guardian critic can accurately call boring, that's not a taste disagreement. That's a script problem.
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