Fashion designer Alice (Nicola Walker) and hair stylist Steve (Flight of the Conchords‘ Jemaine Clement) may be in their fifties, but their friendship still buzzes with fun. At the start of this sharp comedy-drama, they do shots at a funeral, have a drunken singalong to Supergrass‘s ‘Alright’ – a banger from their ’90s salad days – then slink into a trendy London bar. The party almost ends in disaster when Steve’s dog gobbles some dodgy coke from Alice’s handbag, but their decades-old friendship is strong enough to withstand the odd misdemeanour. And thankfully, Crosby The Bulldog makes a full recovery.
What does detonate their friendship, quite spectacularly, is Steve’s sudden and unexpected romance with Alice’s 26-year-old daughter Izzy (Yali Topol Margalith). Though her patient husband Daniel (Joel Fry) is unfazed by this intergenerational relationship, Alice seems to take it as a personal insult. Is she furious because Steve is so much older than Izzy, or because it feels like an act of betrayal? Either way, she resolves to split the couple up by any means necessary, even if this means weaponising Steve’s celebrity clients against him. For much of the series, she’s a woman on the verge of saying or doing something awful. “It’s my job to protect her from people like us,” Alice tells Steve in a rare moment of self-awareness.
Created and written by Sophie Goodhart, who’s previously penned episodes of Sex Education and Rivals, Alice And Steve is wry and stylish without being particularly funny. Comedy stalwart Marcia Warren (The Crown, Vicious) manages to extract some heartier laughs as Val, Alice’s wine-guzzling, sharp-tongued mother, but her character belongs in a more traditional sitcom. She’s essentially a composite of Margaret John’s Doris from Gavin And Stacey and June Whitfield’s Mother from Absolutely Fabulous. A secondary romantic subplot involving Alice’s teenage son Dom (Tyrese Eaton-Dyce) and his clued-up schoolmate Rome (Eilidh Fisher) is sweet but probably unnecessary.
A bigger problem is Steve and Izzy’s flimsy relationship, which moves too fast to feel believable. Played appealingly by Clement with his usual languid-meets-awkward charisma, Steve is a calm and charming cool dad type, but he and self-assured Izzy don’t have much in common. Still, it’s pretty fun watching Alice try to fracture their bond by exposing his complacent and occasionally problematic Gen X views. Of course, she’s also a bit of a dinosaur with a telling habit of lobbing the word “gay” around for a cheap laugh.
Alice And Steve falls into a familiar trap for streaming-era dramedies: it’s neither side-splitting nor properly gripping. But it does has some witty and inventive moments including a shamelessly sentimental homage to an iconic Hollywood film. Crucially, none of the six episodes lasts longer than 30 minutes, so it makes for a bright and breezy binge-watch. When it comes to this pair of squabbling besties, all’s fair in love and war.
‘Alice And Steve’ is on Disney+ now
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