Summary
Alice and Steve isn’t always perfect on a script level, but its challenging premise and a wonderful Nicola Walker performance allow the unconventional “wrong-com” to find genuine emotional sentiment at its core.
As far as elevator pitches go, there are few as inherently icky as the one underpinning Alice and Steve. But is it that bad, really? Well, yeah, it kind of is when you think about it, but that’s a big part of the point. It burns the uncomfortable weirdness for fuel in a steadily escalating “wrong-com” that finds a superb Nicola Walker performance leading us through a cycle of anger, grief, and petty vengeance, buttressed by a surprising amount of genuine – if complicated – emotional sentiment.
We want television like this, don’t we? Stuff that’s a bit challenging and unconventional and difficult to reckon with. Most shows would have Alice (Walker) and Steve (Jemaine Clement, What We Do in the Shadows), best friends of three decades after a brief, failed romance, realising their love for each other. Here, Steve falls into bed with Alice’s 26-year-old daughter, Izzy (Yali Topol Margalith, A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder), leading to not only the breakdown of their friendship but also a string of increasingly demented efforts by Alice to ruin the relationship – and perhaps, if possible, Steve’s entire life.
We’re in tricky waters here. Writer and creator Sophie Goodhart (Sex Education) has to navigate not just the easy, platonic chemistry between Alice and Steve but also its immediate, complete combustion in the wake of a relationship that is wildly inappropriate – Steve has known Izzy since she was a child – but also completely consensual, involving two adults, the youngest of whom is nearly 30. It’s supposed to be complicated. You’re not supposed to know how to feel about it, which is why none of the characters do, including Alice’s husband, Daniel (a brilliant Joel Fry in probably the show’s most thankless part).
The script’s careful with a few things. Izzy has only recently moved back home following a break-up, so a fairly long period of time has elapsed since Steve even laid eyes on her. She doesn’t even know that Steve is divorced, which happened four years prior, establishing support for Steve’s later, breathless claim that he never harboured any attraction for Izzy before she came onto him while he was crashing on Alice’s couch. And she did make the advances, not that Steve provided much resistance. Both also acknowledge that the relationship is ill-advised, but also insist that it’s rooted in genuine, albeit sudden feeling. The point is obvious. We’re to understand that the relationship is inappropriate, but also that this isn’t Lolita.
Not all of this is as neat and tidy as it likes to think. The implicit caveats can feel a bit forced, and the central romance happens much too quickly for us to believe it’s as serious as Izzy and Steve keep claiming. This is part of the point, too, since there’s supposed to be some ambiguity in the attraction, with Steve being a lonely divorcee and Izzy looking for a rebound, but this dynamic requires Izzy and Steve to at least seem like they mean it, and they never quite do. Eventually, though, it becomes obvious that the show isn’t about the authenticity of the relationship so much as how quickly the surrounding relationships can break down around it.
Alice’s impulsivity immediately causes her to lash out at the expense of her marriage to Daniel and her relationship with their son, Dom (Tyrese Eaton-Dyce), who has his own problems. She hyper-fixates on destroying Steve, and then he returns the favour, and everyone in the middle ends up neglected at best by the pointless cycle of petty escalation. It only takes the odd offhanded remark – such as several from Alice’s brilliantly funny mother, Val (Marcia Warren) – to set Alice off on tangents that actively hinder her own life, even while she’s trying to focus on ruining Steve’s.
While Daniel and Dom end up trying to navigate their own personal subplots – the former has to fight off the advances of Marni (Lydia Wilson), a co-worker trying to bring about his sexual liberation, while the latter navigates his feelings for school crush, Rome (Eilidh Fisher) – without Alice, the show is resting firmly on Nicola Walker’s shoulders. Through sheer force of will, she manages to sell the vast majority of the complexity in her relationship with Steve, and the complicated emotions that underpin her feelings about Steve’s relationship with Izzy. She’s a force of nature in this, and the performance is so multifaceted that it papers over almost all the issues that the script can’t quite navigate.
What Alice and Steve is about, really, is not a relationship, inappropriate or otherwise, but about the messy emotional realities that most people would rather avoid than confront head-on. It’s about what those emotions say about us and how we try – haltingly, often misguidedly – to navigate the world, and it’s about how far we might go, and at what cost, when those emotions get the best of us.
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