Imagine your best friend of 30 years suddenly starts dating your 26-year-old daughter. That is the agonising dilemma Nicola Walker’s character faces in Disney+’s sharp new “wrong-com,” Alice and Steve.
But this isn’t your average age-gap story. At the heart of the show is the platonic, decades-long bond between Alice (Walker) and Steve (Jemaine Clement), two 50-something London creatives who have been inseparable since university. She is a loud, leopard-print-wearing clothing designer; he is a celebrity hairstylist.
However, their seemingly unbreakable friendship is quickly dismantled when Steve falls for Alice’s daughter, sparking a chaotic, revenge-fuelled chain of events.
We first meet the pair stumbling out of a friend’s funeral, drunkenly belting Supergrass’s “Alright” before hitting a nightclub with Steve’s beloved French bulldog, Crosby, in tow. It’s during this bender that Alice convinces her lonely friend, who has been single for four years since his divorce, to get back out there and find someone younger.
© Lara Cornell/Disney+Be careful what you wish for.
The night takes a chaotic turn when Crosby chows down on a stray bag of vintage cocaine from Alice’s handbag. The dog survives the near-fatal overdose, as does the pair’s friendship, ending with Steve crashing on Alice’s living room sofa. But the real trouble begins later that night when Alice’s freshly-dumped daughter, Izzy, wanders downstairs wearing nothing but an oversized T-shirt. Oh dear.
After bonding over mutual heartbreak and a shared love of Willie Nelson, Izzy makes her move.
© Lara Cornell/Disney+There’s no denying the cringe factor here. Not only has Steve known Izzy since she was a baby, but he also briefly dated Alice years ago. Ew.
If you can push past the initial weirdness and the couple’s lack of chemistry, it’s hard not to feel for Steve. Despite the dodgy optics, his feelings for Izzy are real and he’s genuinely pained by the damage he’s done to his relationship with Alice.
However, it is this major conflict that makes the show so binge-worthy. Watching the duo’s lifelong bond spiral into a petty war of mutual sabotage is incredibly watchable.
© Lara Cornell/Disney+Alice’s blistering rage manifests in a string of impulsive, disastrous decisions. One of her desperate attempts to end the new relationship includes hosting a dinner party with Izzy’s Gen-Z friends, hoping to expose Steve as an out-of-touch dinosaur by weaponising his love of Woody Allen films and revealing that he “doesn’t believe in recycling”.
While both leads are brilliant, Nicola Walker steals the show. Known largely for her crime drama roles, the Unforgotten star showcases her comedy chops, perfectly capturing both the burning rage and aching heartbreak of a woman watching her best friend and her daughter fall in love.
© Lara Cornell/Disney+Fast-paced, funny, and surprisingly moving, I effortlessly sped through the six half-hour episodes of this chaotic comedy.
Alice and Steve is available to stream on Disney+.
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