The Ricky Gervais Show (TV series)

''The Ricky Gervais Show'' is a comedy animated series produced for and broadcast by HBO and Channel 4. The series is an animated version of the popular British audio podcasts and audiobooks of the same name, which feature Ricky Gervais, Stephen Merchant (creators of ''The Office'' and '' Extras'') along with colleague and friend Karl Pilkington, talking about various subjects behind the microphone. The TV series consists of past audio recordings of these unscripted "pointless conversations," with animation drawn in a style similar to classic era Hanna-Barbera cartoons,Page 2
presenting jokes and situations in a literal context.

The animated ''Ricky Gervais Show'' aired 39 episodes across three seasons starting in 2010. There were some plans for a possible fourth season which would have used newly recorded audio, but this was shelved in June 2012. Series 3 of ''The Ricky Gervais Show'' premiered on 20 April 2012 on HBO, and on 8 May 2012 on E4.

History

After the first series of ''The Office'' was broadcast in 2001, creators Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant returned to local radio station XFM London, where they used to host their own radio show.Page 2
/ref> For this revival of ''The Ricky Gervais Show'', Karl Pilkington worked as radio producer, and steadily became a more and more important part of the show. After years of the three doing the radio show, in 2005, they started doing a series of free podcasts, and later paid audiobooks, available to download on the Internet. The ''Show'' consistently ranked as the number one podcast in the world and previously held the Guinness World Record as the most downloaded podcast ever with over 300 million downloads .

Discussions about the animated series began in 2008; Gervais first mentioned the project on his blog in November 2008. Earlier collaborations with HBO include the co-production of the Gervais/Merchant series '' Extras'' together with the BBC
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