The Ricky Gervais Show premiered on HBO this past Friday, and perhaps it’s my own fault for not reading into the show’s premise, but to my knowledge, the show was billed as an animated adaptation of the unquestioned greatest podcast ever of the same name, featuring Gervais and co-writer Stephen Merchant provoking and unashamedly ripping on their ridiculous pal and caricature, Karl Pilkington.
I, like any humans I’d associate with, was immediately hooked by the podcast in 2005 — the first one I ever regularly downloaded — and listened through all three seasons multiple times with a zeal that might’ve been endearing if I was loving something that much at age five, but which crossed over into the nerdily obsessive at age no-longer-five.
I obviously couldn’t have been more excited to experience new adventures from the beloved podcast trio, who, I further imagined, would perhaps even step up their game in the pilot episode of a new endeavor geared towards a wider audience. Within the first minute, however, to my confusion and eventual disappointment, I realized that this was not, in fact, a new show: The first episode was literally the audio from the first podcast, which came out in 2005, thrown overtop animation of the conversations. It wasn’t just subjects they’d covered before, or a compilation of material they’d already recorded or some kind of podcast backstory — it was just the first episode of the 2005 podcast, essentially intact, with a couple of minor visual jokes added.
Granted, I’m sure there are plenty of people out there that would enjoy the Ricky Gervais Show but never listened to the podcasts, and for them I couldn’t recommend the show enough, but it was still the most downloaded podcast of all time at one point with an average of 260,000+ subscribers in its first season, so the last thing I would’ve expected was for HBO to pass off largely unaltered four-year-old material as new. Sure, the animated bits add a different element to the material, but certainly not enough to curb my or any other fans’ self-induced appetite for new Gervais/Merchant/Pilkington nonsense.
HBO promoting this as “new” was like Radiohead announcing a new album, then releasing a remastered OK Computer with expanded liner notes, or Showtime teasing a new Louis C.K. special that turned out to be his 2004 special synced up with cartoons, like Comedy Central’s Shorties Watching Shorties. Anything that gets more people familiar with the likes of Karl Pilkington can’t be a wholly bad thing, but to any Gervais/Merchant devotees, watching this show — next week’s episode is also just audio from an existing podcast — will be dissatisfyingly redundant.
Don’t get me wrong, the show is still excellent — did I laugh again at “None of these things now needed. Baby Dead.”? Of course. But it’s excellence that already occurred.
Thoughts on the Ricky Gervais Show, podcast devotees or Pilkington-newcomers? Leave ‘em in the comments.
