‘Alice and Steve’ Review: A British Comedy About Friendship, Family, and Very Bad Decisions

With a premise that might raise a few eyebrows — or more than a few — Alice and Steve is a British comedy that leans hard into an uncomfortable situation and wrings as much out of it as it possibly can. That works rather well for the first three episodes or so, before the whole thing transforms into something considerably more pedestrian, literal, and obvious. What you’re left with, in the end, is a promising dramatic comedy undone by the relentless logic of serial television, which manages to spoil nearly everything it had going for it.

Alice and Steve gets off to a cracking start, establishing the warm and wonderfully close friendship between its two title characters — former partners from decades ago who, now well into their fifties, have become each other’s best mates. They get properly drunk at a friend’s funeral, cause all manner of mayhem, and make it abundantly clear that the bond between them runs deep. Steve (Jemaine Clement) is divorced; Alice (Nicola Walker), meanwhile, has remarried — her husband Daniel (Joel Fry) — and has a daughter from a previous relationship, Izzy (Yali Topol Margalith), as well as a son they share together, the amiable Dom (Tyrese Eaton-Dyce). When they return home from that chaotic funeral, they learn that Izzy has just split from her boyfriend and will be staying with her parents for a while.

What nobody sees coming is that same night, Izzy and Steve fall into conversation — sharing their troubles, sharing a drink — and, almost without warning, end up in bed together. What makes the whole thing even more fraught is that Izzy becomes genuinely besotted with Steve, and he, despite initially wanting to leave it at that, simply can’t help himself. The real question, of course, is how Alice is going to take it. Can a lifelong friendship survive the revelation that your best friend is now seeing your daughter? Predictably enough, not without considerable turbulence. What begins as a series of crossed wires, rows, and minor crises quickly snowballs into an ever-expanding mess that pulls in the rest of the family — each of them, naturally, with their own unresolved business to sort out.

For a good stretch, the series holds its nerve within the conventions of classic romantic comedy — albeit one with the added discomfort of a man in his fifties carrying on with a girl in her mid-twenties who also happens to be his ex’s daughter. The whole thing is so thoroughly Woody Allen that Allen himself gets a namecheck during one of the inevitable arguments on the subject. At a certain point, however, the series loses its grip on any semblance of plausibility and slides into territory more reminiscent of a farce, with the two old friends increasingly dedicated to making each other’s lives an absolute misery. Add to that a seemingly endless cascade of new complications, and you’ve got quite a lot on your plate.

British comedy has always had a taste for playing across a wide register — one foot in something recognisably human, the other in the gloriously absurd. Here, Alice’s force-of-nature personality signals early on that things are going to escalate rather sharply. But even by those standards, Alice and Steve eventually loses the plot — quite literally — and loses sight of what made it worth watching in the first place: the genuine complexity of its relationships, the gulf between generations, the ache of loneliness, the question of what love actually looks like at this age, and the particular comfort of chosen family and old friendship.

The final three episodes pile on new conflicts and complications with such enthusiasm that all of that gets buried somewhere beneath the rubble. And by the time the series remembers what it was actually about, it’s rather too late — you may well have run out of patience for the endless contrivances by then. Alice and Steve starts from a strong blueprint and boasts a genuinely terrific cast that radiates charm throughout, which makes it all the more galling to watch it lose the plot to the demands of serial plotting. One can’t help but feel that the same story, made as a film — in the golden age of British romantic comedy of the nineties and noughties — might have been something rather special. Stretching it to three hours of increasingly improbable farce ends up squandering much of what it had to offer.