A new six-part drama called Alice And Steve opens with a friendship so close it sounds almost impossible to break. Then Steve sleeps with Alice’s daughter Izzy, and the show’s central bond begins to splinter in plain sight.
That is the reason the series is landing now: it is built around a betrayal that changes everything for Alice, played by Nicola Walker, and Steve, played by Jemaine Clement. Walker said she would do the same if she were in Alice’s position. “I would do more. I would draw blood,” she said. The line fits the show’s mood, which is less neat moral lesson than social detonation.
Alice And Steve begins with two 50ish exes who went out for a short time “a million years ago” and have since been platonically inseparable. In the first scenes, Alice tells Steve she loves him so much that if he were ever drowning, she would hollow out her own mother’s body and use it as a canoe. They go to funerals, get drunk, talk frankly about their disappointments, devise ill-advised solutions and take cocaine only once every epoch. The friendship looks absurdly durable right up until the moment after one of those funerals, when Steve gets off with Alice’s daughter.
That’s the fault line the writers lean into. Jemaine Clement said the biggest thing is not some abstract idea of age difference, but that Steve slept with his friend’s daughter. Sophie Goodhart pushed the point even further, saying the premise is not really about age gap and that Izzy is the one with slightly more power. She also said Steve is not grooming Izzy. The show keeps returning to that discomfort: a 50-something man, Izzy at 26, and the wreckage left behind when the wrong person in the wrong family crosses the line.
The series does not stop at the betrayal. It also follows Alice and Daniel, played by Joel Fry, through the doldrums of a long marriage, while their teenage son Dom gets a first love that goes exquisitely well until he takes an edible and everything goes awry. But the plot that gives Alice And Steve its bite is the one that sends Alice into revenge mode. Later, she goes full metal jacket, turns up to social events on a cocktail of rosé and dismay, and sets out to humiliate Steve while making life unbearable for everyone else.
Goodhart calls the show a wrongcom and a taboo-busting comedy, and that fits its basic logic: every tender impulse comes wrapped in embarrassment, and every joke lands with a bruise underneath. The creator also said the premise “completely breaks everything” and “scorches the entire area,” which is probably the most precise way to describe what happens when a friendship built on decades of intimacy is blown apart by one night. The question the series leaves hanging is not whether Alice will forgive Steve. It is how much damage she plans to do before that friendship is finished for good.
For more on the casting and the June 8 debut, see the earlier report on Nicola Walker and Jemaine Clement setting the launch of Alice And Steve.
