“Life goes on . . .”

On April 24, Netflix released the six-episode second season of “After Life,” starring, directed, and written by comedian Ricky Gervais. It continues to take viewers through the grief that Gervais’s character Tony Johnson experiences after the death of his wife, Lisa, from breast cancer.  [A post about season one is here.]

Tony’s grief has subsided only a bit since season one, but he suffers from less bitterness and is somewhat more accepting of others, whose foibles he seldom lets pass without mention.  He visits with Anne, the widow on the bench in the cemetery, more often in season two, which seems like a far more therapeutic relationship than he had with the dunderhead counselor he saw in season one.  That counselor, true to form, is not helping Tony’s brother-in-law and newspaper editor, Matt, through a separation from his wife.

The Tambury Gazette continues to send Tony and his photographer, Lenny, to cover usually inane and bizarre “human interest” stories from the local community.

In season two, Tony looks at many more videos of life with Lisa that he has saved to his computer, which continue to connect Tony to Lisa in his most difficult times dealing with his grief, and explains more about Tony and his relationship with Lisa and Tony’s dad Ray, who has dementia and is in a nursing home.  The incipient relationship between Tony and Emma, a caregiver at the nursing home, continues to be incipient.

Tony debates between his bad self and his better self about how to accept that life goes on, even when there is loss.  New York Times writer Dave Itzkoff explains his view of the series.:

“After Life” is suffused with an existentialism that could make it either an ideal tonic right now or too uncomfortably real — and Gervais knows that its tone is tricky even under normal circumstances. As he said in a recent video chat from his home in north London: “The big worry for me was, could people go from laughing about something ridiculous to crying about something very real? I think the answer is yes.”

A portion of Itzkoff’s interview provides Gervais’s views on his series:

Itzkoff:  The themes of death and how we deal with loss are pervasive in “After Life.” Does that make it any more attuned to the current moment? Or does that make it harder to watch?

Gervais:  I think we second-guess people too much. We worry about what the people at home can take. Real life’s worse. They can take all of this. It stuns me that people still think, “Oh, you shouldn’t joke about that.” We’re reading about it in the paper — why can’t we joke about it? With other shows of mine, people come up to me on the street, and they usually say, “I love the show” But with this one — and this was before coronavirus — they come up to me and say, “I just want to say, I lost my sister three weeks ago.” Or, “I lost my husband.” No one said, “Oh, I had to turn it off because it was too upsetting,” or, “It reminded me of something bad.” You suddenly realize, of course — everyone’s grieving. And the older you get, the more you’ve got to grieve.

Itzkoff:  There’s a scene in one of the new episodes when Tony tells another character: “Everything’s bad for you. We’re all dying. Being healthy is just dying more slowly.” Do you think about moments like that one differently now?

Gervais:  I think it would be different if I did a show that was specifically about coronavirus — [wearily] which there are going to be hundreds. And novels. And weird, fake reality shows. But in the abstract, it’s a joke about death, and people are dying all the time. People aren’t going, “No one was dying until this year — that joke didn’t age well.” Tony’s acting nihilistically. He’s reminding people that he’s not over it. He still wants to punish the world. There’s a narcissism to his grieving, in a way. And then he confronts people that are worse off than him and make him feel slightly spoiled. We all go through that.

Itzkoff:  What gets us out of our nihilism and gets us over attitudes like that?

Gervais:  One of the ideas in “After Life” is about how the mundane saves us. We need those little things. The fact that the dog, literally and metaphorically, saves Tony’s life, over and over again. I say to the dog, “If you could open a can, I’d be dead now.” Death is the last taboo. It’s imminent. It’s going to happen. We just don’t want it to be now, whenever it is. But we can still joke about it. I don’t know if that makes the show any more or less poignant or entertaining than any other time. But people do all the things they’re supposed to now: They stay in. They wash their hands. They phone their family. And then, I think, they want to watch “Tiger King.” You know? No one’s thinking about coronavirus when they’re watching. And life goes on. Life’s got to go on. Life goes on.

For those of us focused on the pandemic that is sweeping this nation and the world, as we experience and contemplate the loss of over 204,000 people worldwide, including over 54,000 deaths in the United States, with no end to the increase of deaths in sight, “After Life,” season two, provides for many of us a reminder that, as Paul, the semi-retired owner of the Tambury Gazette, says to Anne, “Life goes on, just not as good.”  And our grief, along with Tony’s, continues.