Nicola Walker and Jemaine Clement's new comedy Alice and Steve is built on a premise designed to make you squirm: a middle-aged man starts dating the daughter of his best friend — a woman 26 years old, younger than their friendship itself.
Billed as a "wrong com", this six-part UK series is intentionally icky. Alice (Walker) is disgusted when her lifelong friend Steve (Clement) begins a relationship with her daughter Izzy (Yali Topol Margalith). That disgust unleashes all-out warfare between the two.
As the duo weaponise decades of shared secrets and their lives begin to crumble, the show almost resembles a British season of Netflix's Beef — but trading bloodshed for the violent secondhand embarrassment of Peep Show or The Thick of It.
It's a sharp turn from the first episode, where a drug-fuelled night out after a funeral shakes off a sombre day. Alice and Steve are lifelong friends who briefly dated aeons ago. They're equally bright, witty and charming, eager to draw people in but less so to share the light.
Both are creatives in image-obsessed industries — Alice is a fashion designer, Steve a hair stylist — and their success has required a level of self-centred immaturity. They don't need to apologise for that with each other.
It's Steve's light — and his "weirdly hot" looks — that sees Izzy pursue him that same night, leading the charge when he's sleeping on their family couch. Their relationship, also led by Izzy, is portrayed as genuine. Steve comes across as more misguided and lonely than malicious, though very few people around them are convinced.
It's undeniably uncomfortable that Steve was like an uncle figure for Izzy, tagging along on family holidays when she was a child.
No wonder Alice goes mad. White-hot with rage and disappointment, she's determined to break them up. First, with a cross-generational dinner party where Alice brings up Steve's love of Woody Allen films in front of Izzy's Gen Z friends. When that fails, she settles for ruining Steve's life — and he retaliates.
It's much funnier than its premise. Walker's roaring fury plays well off Clement's understated comic presence and ultra-dry one-liners. There are big laughs and intriguing relationship dynamics that offer room for a second season.
But as laid out in its title, Alice and Steve isn't terribly interested in Izzy. She's more a plot-driver than a fleshed-out character. Creator Sophie Goodhart is more interested in exploring selfishness than the ethics of its age-gap relationship. She's said repeatedly in interviews that she doesn't see Steve as a groomer.
Yet the possibility lingers in the show itself. While it'd be boring to require television to offer clear moral rulings on its characters, Izzy's lack of interiority — granted to secondary characters like her brother or step-dad — bugs me more and more in the days after finishing the series, overshadowing the laughs.
Alice and Steve is now streaming on Amazon Prime Video.