Review: 'Alice and Steve' Is So, So, So Very Good

Do not be put off by the premise to Alice and Steve, which sounds vaguely ick. It’s the ick that makes it work, and writer/creator Sophie Goodhart (Sex Education) has put together an uncomfortable, emotionally heavy, and hilarious comedy series for Hulu that might just be one of the best of the year. Trust that Walker (MI:5, Unforgotten) and Clement (Flight of the Conchords, What We Do in the Shadows) will not steer you wrong.

Here’s the premise: Alice (Walker) and Steve (Clement) have been best friends for decades. They’re in their 50s. They used to date. Alice is happily married to Daniel (Joel Fry), a decade her junior, and Steve is divorced, owing to his fear of commitment. Steve and Alice have the impeccable chemistry of two people who have spent a lifetime in each other’s orbits. During a night of drinking (and cocaine), Alice insists to Steve that it’s not too late for him to get married, settle down, and have children — he’ll just have to find a younger woman, because the women his age are too old to have kids.

After a nearly catastrophic evening in which the dog nearly dies from ingesting cocaine, Steve stays the night on Alice’s couch. After Alice goes up to bed, her 26-year-old daughter Izzy (Yali Topol Margalith) comes down for a drink. One thing leads to another, and Steve and Izzy hook up.

But it’s more than that. They fall in love. And this? Alice cannot abide. She becomes so obsessed with ending their relationship that Alice and Steve at times turns into a best-friend version of The War of the Roses. But it’s more than that, too. It’s about Steve grappling with middle age. It’s about Alice reckoning with the possibility that she hasn’t been a great wife to Daniel. It’s about Izzy — her apparent fear of loneliness, and the safety and stability an older man provides, even if that older man is her mother’s best friend.

It’s also worth pausing to note just how wonderfully funny Alice and Steve is. Uncomfortably funny, sweetly funny, acerbically funny, and at moments just flat-out hysterical. Alice resents Steve for sleeping with her daughter, and Steve resents Alice for what she does to him later in the series, but there’s such a powerful gravitational pull between the two that they can’t escape each other’s orbit — and Izzy, of course, keeps them permanently tethered.

What’s remarkable is how deftly the show uses this uncomfortable, almost-but-not-quite-creepy relationship to excavate so many other themes — and how the comedy creates enough breathing room for genuine emotional excavation without tipping Alice and Steve into heavy dramatic territory. It’s just fantastic: a six-episode series so irresistible it’s nearly impossible not to consume in a single sitting, and equally impossible not to feel a little bereft when it’s over.

‘Alice and Steve’ is currently streaming on Hulu/Disney+.