Alley Cats is a British adult animated television series by Ricky Gervais for Netflix. Produced by Derek Productions Limited, Shush Creative and Blink Industries, the series was released on 7 August 2026, on Netflix. Critical reception for Alley Cats was predominantly negative.
Contents
Voice cast
Ricky Gervais as Gus, a cynical and lazy overweight ginger tabby cat
Tom Basden as Rupert (aka Ponce), a logical, privileged chartreux
Andrew Brooke as Fang, a rough-and-tumble tuxedo cat
David Earl as Puke, a scrawny, scruffy, hyper-sexualised Havana Brown
Kerry Godliman as Lara, a sarcastic silver tabby cat and Gus's love interest
Jo Hartley as Kitten, a timid, innocent black kitten
Diane Morgan as Olive, Gus's dim-witted half-sister
Natalie Cassidy as Gus's mum, Gus's old, ailing mother
Tony Way as Drug Dealer, a large and overweight tabby cat of a shady personality that works as a drug kingpin
Release
In June 2026, the series was revealed via a trailer. Alley Cats premiered on 7 August on Netflix.
Reception
Alley Cats topped the UK Netflix chart in its first week despite receiving largely negative reviews from critics, many of whom criticised its writing, pacing, and reliance on shock humour, though a handful of reviewers found it more sweet-natured than expected.
On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, 24% of 17 critics' reviews are positive, with an average rating of 3.3/10.
Writing for Screen Rant, Dani Kessel Odem described the series as an "uninspired, unfunny slog," singling out the animation as looking "incredibly cheap" and arguing that the show's humour and narrative both fell flat across its six episodes. Empire was similarly unimpressed, writing that the series was not so much offensive as simply "not very good," criticising an "unearned" emotional tone in each episode's closing minutes and describing much of the swearing-driven comedy as juvenile.
The Hollywood Reporter gave a mixed-to-negative assessment, finding the show's tonal shifts between crudeness and sentimentality unconvincing and concluding that it was "rarely all that funny," while allowing that the voice cast and character design showed some promise. HuffPost UK's roundup of critical reaction noted that several reviewers went further, with the show being labelled by some critics as among the worst television of the year. Writing in The Guardian, Lucy Mangan gave the show two stars out of five, calling it "lazy, crude and boring" and accusing Gervais of "indulging himself in lesser projects"; Mangan's colleague Rhik Samadder concurred, describing Alley Cats as "lazy, dated and far too pleased with itself." In a review for Metro, Tom Percival gave the show one star out of five, writing: "I knew Ricky Gervais' Alley Cats was going to be terrible, but Christ."
Not all reviews were negative. Variety described the series as "surprisingly bittersweet," praising an underlying melancholy that cut against Gervais's reputation for pure acerbity, though also noting that the show's compressed runtime left some subplots underdeveloped. John Cleese described the series as "quite wonderful" in a post on X.
