A star rating of 4 out of 5.
Forget love stories — new Disney+ comedy-drama Alice and Steve is a true hate story.
Starring Nicola Walker and Jemaine Clement, this is about how an escalating feud between two fifty-something friends risks ruining their lives and relationships. Although this is in a comic way, not a ‘Channel 5 original drama’ sort of way…
The decades-long friendship between Alice (Walker) and Steve (Clement) grew from a fizzled-out romantic relationship when they were students. Today, Alice is a cool but self-centred fashion designer; Steve a witty but insecure and recently divorced hairdresser. On a night out, Alice encourages him to find a new, younger girlfriend, and Steve demurs. But when he crashes on Alice’s sofa for the night, there’s immediate chemistry with her recently dumped 20-something daughter Izzy (Yali Topol Margalith). Uh-oh.
It’s an impressively wrong-footing premise from screenwriter Sophie Goodhart, which challenges prejudices about age-gap relationships, and then challenges that challenge. At one moment, it doesn’t seem so strange that this could happen: Izzy clearly makes the first move on Steve, they have genuine chemistry and are both quick to try and apologise to and reassure Alice that they’re in this for the right reasons.
At the next, we’re brought back down to earth with the reminder that Steve used to go on holiday with Alice and her family when Izzy was a child, which makes this new relationship inherently creepy (not to mention the fact that he once dated Alice herself).
Then, just as we feel like we finally have a handle on how we’re supposed to feel about this situation, sympathies towards Steve soften given just how extreme Alice’s reaction is. She’s so viciously opposed to the match that she uses her intimate knowledge of Steve’s life to sabotage his hairdressing career, bad-mouth him to his celebrity clients and even get his dog taken away.
Steve, in response, trashes Alice’s work life and spills damaging secrets to her husband. And that’s another great fly in Alice’s ointment – she is herself roughly a decade older than her husband Daniel (Joel Fry) – and has a complacent attitude to their relationship that Daniel is beginning to resent.
As Alice and Steve clash, it becomes an arms race of petty revenge. The series falls short of veering into melodrama, and some of the more poignant moments allow you to glimpse the shattered foundation of this friendship. But still, buried under all that resentment, is a shared history and dynamic that can’t entirely disappear.
It’s presumably why the series is called Alice and Steve, not ‘Izzy and Steve’. While the romantic relationship is the staging point for all the dramatic tension, the more interesting story is about the friendship it’s destroying.
That probably makes this series sound less fun than it is. While often not exactly laugh-out-loud funny, Clement’s comedy background (Flight of the Conchords, What We Do in the Shadows) makes him a reliable source of dry one-liners, and the intergenerational conflict – like when Steve makes a cringeworthy debut to Izzy’s cool friends – will bring smiles of recognition.
That said, where Alice and Steve falters is perhaps in trying to cram too much into its 30-minute instalments.
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I’m not sure the put-upon Daniel needed quite so much of his own flirtation-with-a-colleague subplot, while the same could be said for his and Alice’s teenage son Dom (Tyrese Eaton-Dyce) and his new romantic explorations. In the final episode, it also feels like the series loses some momentum, giving the characters a too-easy “off-ramp” from the thorny dilemmas they’re facing (dare we go so far to call it a cop-out?).
When Radio Times spoke to Clement and Walker, both hoped for a second series. Depending on how this first run is received we may see these monstrous BFFs return. That’s if Alice and Steve can stand to be in the same room by then.
All episodes of Alice and Steve are available to watch on Disney+ from 8 June.
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