I liked the show and it's a return to form for Gervais but this scene still puzzles me. What was the point of it?

You're right, if there was some redemption like he gave money to his homeless friend's family, or even started working against drugs, that I could understand. But...nothing.

Hope you enjoyed the rest of the show though.

2nd season is out. A friend watched and tells me that Gervais practically retconned the murder. If that's the case, it makes me highly suspicious of Gervais himself in real life. What kind of person presents an unrepentant murderer as a sympathetic character? Unless its a weird social experiment to see how many people he can sucker in to being OK with murder I think its a sign of sociopathy.

He doesn't retcon it directly, but you could say he did by not mentioning it all.

It was pretty much a retread of the 1st season, except this one had more unbearable bits. Although there were some nice emotional parts, I found it a lot more aware of itself and enhanced the characters to parody levels, such as the psychiatrist. For a show that was meant to be realistic in its representation of grief, it had a lot of completely unrealistic situations and characters.