I've just finished it and am glad to have had a fair few tearful moments of my own during it. I think the same show would have been received very differently if it had not been a Ricky Gervais vehicle or something written by anyone successful in comedy genuinely writing comic drama. It's had an especially vicious slating on the comedy forum Cookd n Bombd, from people who seem at least as at odds with their own sense of thwartedness and failure as Gervais. At least he is doing something constructive in carrying on undeterred. The first episode was a bit of a mess, and some of the ways it was reappeared. Comparing the level of subtlety to Derek though, it looks like Gervais is finding his voice in the way a good novelist has to. He's in his 50s, not fresh out of university, but is breaking away late from comedy that many of us have enjoyed but which inevitably comes easier because it only comes at all and has an energy if the comedian doesn't worry about the consequences of his thinking, whether through misunderstandings or not. I didn't finish Derek because the comedian's glibness and lack of brakes spoiled it. It was still a comedian's writing when more editing was needed. That's been improved upon in After Life series 2 - even the first series seemed to fall apart halfway through.
It'd be an understatement to say that Ricky hasn't handled fame well, that he'd do a better job of that and be received better if he binned his Twitter account. There are comedians who are 'always on' and ones who aren't. To go home from the writing room and have Twitter nearby must be the worst kind of being always on.
I think often I cried because when I look at my life and that of others I know there isn't growth. If anything a lot of people remain stuck as if archetypes. And maybe that is another reason why the comedy fans have had their ire for this series - either their cynicism made them sickened by signs of growth, after a couple of decades of aggressively mean-spirited and ugly humour, or they're just plain stuck, and the safety of their anger - which is really just aggressive embarrassment, like child caught stealing his mum's chocolate - and their cynicism feels, deceptively, more like strength than eve to entertain being clumsily kind, or to write with some clumsiness about kindness.
If he writes TV and films for another twenty years I think Gervais could still top The Office, maybe a few times.