Diana Morgan

Ricky Gervais is, take your pick, ever reinventive (a la Madonna, Lady Gaga, the royals) or ever mutating (the worst kind of spirally viruses, the royals). A year ago, in Tony Johnson, subject of his latest drama, After Life, he combined aspects of past characters: The Office's gloriously unself-aware Brent; the more savvy Andy Millman in Extras; the saccharine platitudes that sat so ill in Derek alongside gags about mental health or other disabilities. After Life was a surprising runaway hit on Netflix, for an arguably slight comedy about a very singular, small-town man's depression after the loss of his wife, and how an angry man learned to be kind again.

I happen to like Gervais. Many don't. I relish his takes on some complex aspects of life - freedom of speech, organised religion, disorganised religion of the variety that tends to revere big lumps of rock or small ones of crystal, people who describe themselves as "people people". I like his loyalty to actors, although with such talents as Kerry Godliman and Ashley Jensen around it's surely not hard. And Gervais, bless, has done it again - same local paper, staffed by the soft of brain and low of self-esteem, same gallery of township grotesques, same lonely flat occupied by lovely dog Brandy and many long nights of the soul, pills to hand and large glass of red and videos of his late Lisa.

And I think I see what he's trying to do with the formula. To show how every single one of life's travails, when it angers one inordinately, can be surmounted, no matter one's grief, by a half-sigh of tolerance, of kindness - as long as the sugar is intercut with Gervais showing how mean he, and life, can be.

Part of the problem with this six-part second series is the scatological glee with which he hugs these acid segments. So it's not enough to have a cartoonishly unempathetic therapist; Paul Kaye has to make Chris Finch (The Office's rampant misogynist) look achingly woke. Not enough to have am-dram spoiled by a fat kid farting - he has to soil himself on stage. And, no matter that the arc of this second series is ultimately rewarding, hugely if quietly aided by the likes of Penelope Wilton and Diana Morgan - I'm just not sure whether this second journey is worth the lack of laughs it takes to get there. Because it is, indeed, just less funny. And if the message is the only thing, never mind the laughs crude or otherwise, I'm not sure whether it's worth the saying.

Euan Ferguson, The Observer, 26th April 2020

I made the mistake a few weeks ago of powering through every single outing of Nick Hornby's lovely, subtle State of the Union in a single night. I won't be erring in similar fashion with the latest series of Motherland, even though it's tempting, it all having been dumped on iPlayer in one greedy gloop.

No, I'll savour it: and the opener (all right, opening two) have riches to savour indeed. Chiefly, in the first, the gutsy performance of Tanya Moodie as 'aving-it-all, high-flying mum Meg, who soon lets slip that her very singular definition of "juggling" is being able to conduct a fluent South American conference-call while throwing up in a pub toilet, having just been arrested for pissing in the street. To, first of all, Julia (Anna Maxwell Martin) and her jealous disdain - her wordless, mouth-stretching half-sneers to every one of Meg's matey gambits are a joy to half-behold - and, then, her sneaking admiration: might Meg even be a role-model, a mentor, someone who can help her navigate the vicissitudes of middle-class London motherhood?

No.

Julia sinks back to her comfort levels of harried incompetence - and even below those levels, soon taking to arriving at the losers' table in the cafe in sweatpants and cheap faux-furry coat. Even Liz, the wonderfully sane-speaking Diana Morgan, raises an eyebrow: "You look like a mental patient."

Is Julia about to have that long-threatened, possibly delicious, full English breakdown? And how long can the (equally well-drawn) Amanda (Lucy Punch), arriving way late to the "hygge" beanfeast with her over-niche shop ("store," she will insist), funded by hubby's guilt-money over the split, continue to sell scented candles at £89? Cards only ("we're cashless!")? I'm going to wait to find out, and suggest you toy weekly with it: subtler than Sharon Horgan's Catastrophe, with input from a further three writers, this is at most turns a joy, although occasionally the type of joy felt upon the absence of pain about 40 seconds after stepping on a piece of Lego in your bare feet.

Euan Ferguson, The Observer, 13th October 2019