Alice and Steve: Feuding besties comedy fails to fire

Alice and Steve certainly has its moments.

There’s a scene when the two title characters have to rush to the vet with Steve’s dog when they realise the pup has ingested Alice’s cocaine. Or Alice’s reaction on the bus when she realises a plan of sabotage she put in motion actually worked – and now she regrets it.

OK, and by “moments”, we mean occasional beats that might elicit a chuckle or a wry smile.

Hold onto that, because the series taken as a whole is a letdown. It starts off with a promising premise and then loses steam without anywhere interesting to go.

So, instead, it’s a collection of moments, sometimes funny, often not, rather than anything worth the three hours given over to this British series.

Alice (Nicola Walker) and Steve (Jemaine Clement) are two great friends in their 50s. She’s married to a younger man, Daniel (Joel Fry), with two kids, and he’s a few years on from his divorce. When the subject of his desire for potential fatherhood comes up, she advises him to shack up with a younger woman.

What Alice definitely didn’t have in mind was that younger woman would be Izzy (Yali Topol Margalith), her 26-year-old daughter.

Alice is apoplectic, understandably. Steve is double Izzy’s age, and Alice takes it as a personal betrayal of their long-standing friendship, as well as just the general disdain of “she’s just starting, we’re nearing the end”.

The schism leads to a feud, where they both set out to take the other down – they’ve known each other so long, they are the holder of each other’s shameful secrets.

That’s a fun sequence, but it doesn’t form a significant portion of the six-episode series.

Alice and Steve is billed as a comedy but, at times, it’s more like a tragedy, and not the funny kind.

Alice’s marriage to Daniel is not as set-and-forget as she had thought, and a revelation from Steve to Daniel triggers a separation between the couple. It’s a reckoning Alice is not prepared to face, and there’s no evidence that she does.

It’s not just that both these characters are not exactly likeable, that would be fine, but they’re also fuzzily defined. You don’t get a real sense of them by the end of the series, which makes it difficult to invest in the show.

There’s also meant to be a dilemma at the heart of the conflict – you empathise with Alice because no mother wants her 20-something daughter to be hooking up with a man twice her age, but also, Izzy is a consenting adult who is presented as grounded and capable of making her own decisions.

But Izzy and Steve are not convincing as a couple, and Clement and Margalith don’t have any persuasive chemistry to move the pairing beyond “ick”.

Taken as is, Steve is probably having a mid-life crisis moment, but the series doesn’t shade this in, and you’re left to make assumptions that aren’t supported by the text.

Despite its promising start, Alice and Steve is a fizzer, which is such a shame because there are great comedic talents involved. It just doesn’t give them that much to do.

Alice and Steve is on Disney+