It can be hard to believe from the vantage point of 2015, but there was a time when Ricky Gervais was widely loved. The Office was rightly heralded as one of the best and most influential sitcoms of all time, and Gervais could claim the lion’s share of the credit for its brilliance. His follow-up series, Extras, wasn’t quite as acclaimed, but it was still widely loved by critics and audiences alike, and embraced as a more-than-worthy follow-up to one of the all-time great television shows of all time. 

Things started to go south after that, around the time Gervais decided he was a comedian. I remember suffering through a set where, Gervais, having recently lost 20 pounds, decided to do something like 20 minutes on how gross fat people, particularly fat women, were, and I went from a fan to a detractor. The cruelty endemic in Gervais’ comic persona no longer seemed self-deprecating, but increasingly vicious and misanthropic. Gervais followed up a show making fun of his less-than-brilliant friend Karl Pilkington (An Idiot Abroad) with a show making fun of little people (Life’s Too Short) and then by playing mentally challenged man with a heart of gold (Derek). It was as if Gervais was trolling and baiting for his former fans and current haters. Gervais has since fallen so far in the public esteem that he was in a commercial not so long ago whose central premise is that Gervais’ adorable niece can’t Google him without encountering myriads signs of how hated he has become. So news of a new Gervais project is bound to generate slightly less enthusiasm than it did around the time The Office was still on the air, or when Extras was ending. 

Nevertheless, as a fan/apologist of Gervais’ movie career—I would argue that both of Gervais’ big cinematic vehicles, Ghost Town and The Invention Of Lying, are underrated and misunderstood—I am excited by the news that Netflix has picked up his next writing and directorial vehicle, Special Correspondents. The film is a satire starring Eric Bana as an East Coast radio journalist whose narcissism has hindered him professionally. So in a bid to save his career, he embarks on a Jayson Blair-like charade, delivering faux-frontline war reports from the comfort and safety of Manhattan.  

The character of an arrogant man engaged in an elaborate ruse to save his flailing career seems like the kind of role Gervais would have played before the failures of The Invention Of Lying and Ghost Town, so it’ll be interesting to see Bana, who started off as a stand-up comedian before establishing himself as a dramatic actor, will play the character. Special Correspondents will stream sometime next year. For nostalgia's sake, at the very least, I will give it a chance.