By George & Josh Bate
Let’s say you have a best friend, who you’ve known for decades. Someone who has unwaveringly been by your side through thick and thin. Now imagine that best friend, suddenly and without warning, starts to date your child. A premise that kicks off six episodes of turmoil and angst for its trio of lead characters lays the foundation for a briskly paced, witty, and unexpectedly thought-provoking series.
Streaming now on Hulu, Alice and Steve stars Nicola Walker as the former and Jemaine Clement as the latter, longtime friends now in their fifties. After a frenetic night that involves attending a friend’s funeral and an emergency trip to the vet after Steve’s dog accidentally sneaks into their stash of cocaine, Steve crashes on the couch at Alice’s house and, soon after, sleeps with Alice’s grown daughter Izzy (Yali Topol Margalith). Incensed at what she perceives as the most egregious of betrayals, Alice plummets her previously rock solid friendship into a vicious and messy feud.
Alice and Steve comes from creator and writer Sophie Goodhart, best known for her work on Sex Education. Like the hit Netflix series, Goodhart’s latest work flourishes in finding humor out of the uncomfortable. While the first episode establishes Clement’s Steve as a sweet, soft-spoken, and bumbling guy, one can’t help but cringe when he has sex and starts a romantic relationship with a woman 30 years younger than him, a woman that he has seen grow up since she was a baby. A joke at one point in the series pokes fun at Steve being an admirer of Woody Allen’s films, which not only serves as a humorous point of tension between him and Izzy’s friends but also gives a wink to the audience that Steve and Izzy’s relationship bears a disturbing resemblance to Woody Allen and Soon-Yi Previn’s controversial bond.
In less capable hands, Steve and, to a lesser extent, Izzy would be the de facto antagonists of the series, but Clement’s undeniably charming performance and Goodhart’s willingness to explore the flaws of every character on screen ensures that things aren’t this simple. Nicola Walker’s Alice transforms into a force of nature, disregarding her kind yet meek husband and teenage son as she becomes all consumed by ruining the relationship between her ex-best friend and beloved daughter. Alice behaves in questionable and, at times, rather offputting ways over the course of the season, behaviors that at multiple times are characterized as selfish by others.
With Alice blinded by a pursuit of vengeance and Steve’s willingness to engage in a relationship with a hefty age gap with a person he knew since she was a baby, Alice and Steve makes it clear that there are no good guys or bad guys in its story. Yali Topol Margalith’s Izzy exudes swagger as the woman in the middle of her mother and new boyfriend and too behaves ethically questionable ways as she repeatedly invalidates her mother’s feelings about the situation and seems unmoved by how it all affects her mother.
In turn, Alice and Steve excels in continually posing questions about its characters’ moral standing to the audience. Is Steve in the wrong? Is Alice? Is Izzy? All of the above? Some of the above? Goodhart’s writing ensures that answers to these questions don’t come simply and, as a result, we can’t help but simultaneously love and hate everyone involved.
With just six 30 minute episodes, Alice and Steve propels forward with breakneck pacing that both helps and hinders the series. While such pacing guarantees that there is rarely, if ever, a lull, it comes at the expense of developing the controversial relationship that sparks the entire series into action. Steve and Izzy’s romance is surprisingly underdeveloped across the six episodes. Clement and Margalith lack the chemistry that the former has with Walker and the audience never really feels why Steve would ‘betray’ his decades-long friend to be with Izzy. Steve professes his love for Izzy and commits to her, yet we never quite understand what he sees in Izzy, or what Izzy sees in him.
Instead, the series spends time that could be allocated to fleshing out Steve and Izzy’s relationship to far less interesting subplots involving her husband and teenage son. Both of these subplots fail to reach the heights of humor and drama as the central storyline does and, ultimately, serve as representations of how Alice’s behavior is impacting those around her. Every minute spent on these subpar subplots feels like a minute taken away from nuancing Steve and Izzy’s bond and getting inside each of their heads.
As is the case in any comedy series, the humor in Alice and Steve is rather miss or miss. There are some great laughs to be had, such as the aforementioned Woody Allen bit, but there’s also more juvenile and less clever humor sprinkled throughout. Thankfully, the misfires with humor don’t take one out of the story nor do they hinder overall enjoyment, although it is a tad surprising that a series starring Flight of the Conchords’ Jemaine Clement and written by a key writer of Sex Education is as inconsistently funny as it is.
After taking a number of shocking twists and turns in its narrative, Alice and Steve culminates in an intense, rollicking finale that unfortunately concludes abruptly and prematurely. Leaving your audience hanging for the next season is always a safe bet to get viewers vocally clamoring for more episodes, but the finale concludes on such a cliffhanger (both figuratively and literally) that it feels as if the audience has been deprived of any semblance of a satisfying resolution to the story. Yes, it certainly does its job in making us desperately want to see what happens next, but why does this need to come at the expense of a well-rounded conclusion?
VERDICT: 7/10
Now streaming on Hulu, Alice and Steve finds series creator Sophie Goodhart lean on what made Sex Education as effective as it was by deftly finding humor in the uncomfortable. The new series subverts branding certain characters as straightforward protagonists and antagonists, instead continually posing questions of the characters’ moral standing to the audience. Everyone is well-intentioned, yet makes some pretty abhorrent decisions along the way, in turn centering the six episodes around complex and fascinatingly flawed characters. Breakneck pacing ensures that there is never a lull in the examination of these characters, although moving so briskly leaves little room to explore the core relationship that kicks the entire series into gear. With humor that hits and misses in equal measure, Alice and Steve culminates in an intense, rollicking finale that unfortunately concludes on such a cliffhanger (both figuratively and literally) that it deprives one of any semblance of a satisfying resolution. That being said, the finale certainly does its job as we are desperate to see what happens to Alice, Steve, and Izzy, three flawed characters who, over the course of six episodes, are difficult not to become entranced by.
All six episodes of Alice and Steve are now streaming on Hulu
