YMMV / After Life (2019)

• He Really Can Act: Gervais is well-known and loved for his skill in playing the Deadpan Snarker, and Tony is no exception. However, many viewers were blown away by the sheer amount of genuine pathos that Gervais brings to Tony, a character who can make the audience laugh in one moment, and then damn near bawl their eyes out the next. His performance in the Season 2 finale, especially, hit hard with many.
• Iron Woobie: Lisa is shown to be an inspiringly steadfast woman in spite of her inoperable cancer, thinking only of Tony's grief instead of her own pain.
• Jerkass Woobie:
  • Tony all the way. His bitter rants against anyone who annoys him in the slightest is a rather flimsy coping mechanism at having to live in a world without the love of his life. It's acknowledged in-universe by pretty much all of the supporting cast, who take Tony's abuse because they genuinely don't want him to give up on life.
  • Brian is a racist, sexist, defensive weirdo. He's also not coping with the fact that his ex-wife cheated on him. In the final episode he brings up a full list of degrading situations he's lived through, including giving a blowjob. Having two boorish arseholes humiliate him further in front of the entire town was considered his absolute lowest point.
• Moral Event Horizon:
  • One of the biggest debates about the series is whether Tony crossed it by giving Julian the money to buy enough drugs for a fatal overdose, knowing full well what Julian planned to do. For some, it can be considered an act of mercy, since Julian outright stated that he had nothing left to live for since the death of his girlfriend, and felt like he deserved nothing less than suicide. However, others have pointed to the fact that the show's entire message seems to be that life is worth living, and Tony just deciding to assist Julian in his suicide was more of a selfish act than anything, as Tony was shown ultimately incapable of the act himself, and almost seemed like he just wanted to give Julian an out because he couldn't do it himself. Considering Tony's growth over the course of the series, however, it can be argued that his decision was borne from Tony's low-point, life-is-meaningless mentality at the time, and the Tony of Season 2 definitely wouldn't have given Julian the money.
  • When confronting Tony about threatening a child with a hammer, Matt outright says, "This is the worst thing you've done." Tellingly, he refuses to even hear about Tony's involvement with Julian's death, all but asking Tony to lie to him about it.
• Stoic Woobie: Matt. He takes a lot of Tony's bitterness due to being both his boss and his brother-in-law, but as Tony soon finds out, he's got problems of his own. Matt's wife wants a divorce, the paper he's managing is losing revenue with their only successful employee getting outed as a sexual predator and the woman that Tony's grieving over was his older sister, as in somebody he's known his whole life as opposed to someone Tony met well into adulthood.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic: "Postman" Pat is very intrusive in Tony's life with not much in the way of a Freudian Excuse like the other characters. When he starts dating Daphne the sex worker, he develops an insecurity about her job. In a misguided attempt to appear masculine, Pat demands Daphne choose either him or her job. Having to sacrifice a career to appease a demanding partner is a common element in many domestic abuse anecdotes, so it's little wonder Roxxy picked her job over him.
• The Woobie: Pretty much everybody, save for the unprofessional psychiatrist and his misogynistic mates, although in Season 2 you do get the impression that the unprofessional shrink isn't the happiest of bunnies either.

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