'The Ricky Gervais Show'
The British comedian goes the animated route in his latest HBO series.
February 19, 2010
British comedian Ricky Gervais' third television series, after "The Office" and "Extras," is a cartoon called “The Ricky Gervais Show.” Its audio is lifted from a series of podcasts, also titled "The Ricky Gervais Show," that began at the end of 2005 as a free online feature of the British newspaper the Guardian and was a successor to a radio show on London's XFM. (It moved on to a pay-to-listen "audio book" version.) It is described here as "a series of pointless conversations."
The cartoon show, which begins Friday night on HBO -- it's Gervais' American home away from home -- is the least of his series, but it is generally amusing and pretty to watch, and I like the way it rambles. (Rambling is a quality largely absent from professional television.) It stars Gervais, Stephen Merchant (his co-writer on "The Office," and co-writer and costar in "Extras") and Karl Pilkington, a "producer" of the original radio show and now a star in his own right.
http://articles.latimes.com/2010/feb/19/entertainment/la-et-gervais19-2010feb19