The votes are in, the ballots cast; if you are still in line, please turn around and meekly walk home. That’s right, the nation has had its say on the best comedy TV show of the modern era (post-2010). And the winner is, erm, Ricky Gervais’s After Life.
If you’re scratching your head and thinking, “wait, what?”, that’s entirely fair. Here’s a brief and entirely non-exhaustive list of some of the great UK comedies to have emerged over the past 16 years: The Trip, The Detectorists, Fleabag, Alan Partridge’s Mid Morning Matters, This Country, Derry Girls, Stath Lets Flats, Ghosts, Catastrophe, Here We Go and Chewing Gum. That’s a lot of good television. Only some of these feature on Radio Times’ poll of our best modern comedies, but even those that do received far fewer votes than After Life.
Released on Netflix in three series between 2019 and 2022, After Life stars Gervais as a foul-mouthed and misanthropic widower adjusting to life after profound grief. It is also a show about how much Ricky Gervais really likes his dog. Some people, including myself, found it mawkish, cynical and lacking in laughs – a far cry from Gervais’s unimpeachable best work (namely, The Office). Many others, however, liked it a great deal – including some people who weren’t among the ranks of the Radio Times’s public voting body. But the best modern comedy?
Polls like this one are, to some extent, a fool’s errand – a random and meaningless arbitration on something that fundamentally boils down to personal taste. They are designed to provoke and annoy, and if you’re anything like me, this one sure managed that. But they are also useful, when it comes to understanding a media landscape, understanding what “good TV” even looks like, in the popular imagination. It’s probably true that After Life would not have swept the ranking had it not been for Gervais’s large, zealous online following, true too that After Life’s crown is, more than anything, a reflection of Netflix’s enviable reach and market dominance. (Gervais, to be fair, admitted as much, conceding to the Radio Times that it had topped the poll in part “because it’s on Netflix, the biggest platform in the world, with 300 million subscribers”.)
Significantly, Netflix’s global, no-borders distribution model means that After Life has never felt like an idiosyncratically British concoction; it is popular oversees in a way that something like Stath Lets Flats is not. Tellingly, some of the very best TV shows to have been omitted from the ranking are also some of the most obstinately Brit-coded: Matt Berry’s Toast of London, for instance, an eccentric and wildly silly skewering of British thespianism, or Him and Her, Stefan Golaszewski’s credibly squalid couple-comedy set in a Walthamstow bedsit.
What’s perhaps more interesting is what such a list will look like a few decades down the line: how many of the shows featured here would still make the cut? We already have a good idea of which comedies from the 2000s have ossified into the canon (Peep Show, The Thick of It), and which have faded with time. (When was the last time someone said to you, “I’ve been rewatching Phoenix Nights?”) Sometimes, you can tell a series is great because you can see its emulators everywhere. There are still, to this day, TV shows beholden toThe Royle Family, Brass Eye, and The Office. Are there any shows out there attempting to ape After Life?
If anything, this list – both in its inclusions and in its glaring omissions – suggests that there is still juice in our comedy industry. In the US, the past decade and a half have seen traditional sitcoms all but disappear – the better ones evolving, thanks to the influence of shows like Girls and Atlanta, into a type of short-form comedy-drama. But here in Britain, there is still an appetite for pure, daft comedy. In the end, that will endure.
