Earlier this month Warner Home Video released the complete first season of The Ricky Gervais Show on DVD and this is how it went.
The show is unique; as Gervais and his fellow podcast personalities Stephen Merchant (you can find him in Hot Fuzz as the owner of the swan) and often abused Karl Pilkington basically sit down to discuss many topics. The only consistent thing about the show is the inclusion of ‘monkey news’ in nearly every show. Other than that, a typical show consists of Gervais and Merchant being overly cruel to Karl. Is this a bad thing? In my opinion, no. Karl Pilkington is the catalyst for everything humorous on the show and when you mix that with the witty, fast-paced minds of Gervais and Merchant it turns to comedic gold.
Our webmaster on the site introduced me to this show about a year ago and I found the cruelty of it all to be quite refreshing. The Three Stooges had Curly, The Marx Brothers had Harpo, so it’s not like there hasn’t been a character in a group that gets a lot of cruelty applied to them in film or television before. That’s what’s kind of confusing about some of the backlash I’ve heard on the show. A lot of people I’ve talked to don’t like the fact that Gervais and Merchant treat Pilkington so badly. Without Pilkington’s pitifully, dunce-like character the show probably doesn’t work as well. You would have another pointless podcast where no one is particularly funny (see our podcast for details). Thankfully, what you get with many shows in this complete first season is a solid set of random topics that Karl pushes through and the others tend to make fun of. For example, there is an episode where Karl explains how babies should be born just as someone dies. He goes on to explain, with example, that just as an old lady is about to die she gives birth to a baby version of herself, so she can keep on living. How could you not love this type of humor?
The entire season is this way and it’s all random in hindsight, which is how a podcast should be ultimately. If it weren’t random then it would be a radio show, which would suck.
Anyway, the real edge this show carries with it is the fact that it’s completely animated. Had Gervais and company decided to show their ugly mugs then it probably wouldn’t have been as effective. Not only does the animation sort of provide that ‘innocent’ feel to the humor, but it gives a chance for ‘cutaways’ when Karl is talking. So, instead of just imagining an old woman dying and dropping a baby version of her on the ground, you get to actually see an animated version of it. Sure that doesn’t sound very visually appealing, but generally there is no grotesqueness to the animation (so, don’t worry).
Overall, the first complete season of the show is an experiment in ‘Does this work?’ and it passes with flying colors. At the beginning of the first season you can feel the bit of uncertainness and by the end of the first season you can see the show rolling along perfectly. Is this the funniest show ever? No, but it’s certainly creative and unique in presentation, plus it’s funny as hell at times.