Alice & Steve

So I want to start with an admission. I had absolutely no idea this show was coming. It flew completely under the radar for me. One day it just appeared on Disney Plus, and once I saw the two names attached to it, I was watching it that same evening. And honestly? It was one of the best surprises I’ve had in front of the TV this year.

The show has been tagged as a “wrong-com.” That’s the label they’re running with, and after six episodes I think it earns it. It’s not quite a rom-com, it’s not quite a drama. It sits somewhere in between, and Sophie Goodhart, who you might know from Sex Education, has found a tone that walks that line brilliantly. The premise is simple enough on paper. Alice and Steve have been best friends for twenty-five years. They’ve seen each other through marriages, divorces, everything. Then Steve starts dating Izzy, Alice’s twenty-six-year-old daughter, and everything explodes.

That’s the spark. What follows is six episodes of escalating chaos, cringe comedy, dark emotion, and two lead performances that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about.

Let me give you a bit of context before we get into the detail. This is a British production from Clerkenwell Films, the same company behind Baby Reindeer, which is some serious pedigree. The series is six episodes, each around thirty minutes, so it’s easy to consume in a single sitting, and trust me, you will want to. It dropped on Disney Plus in June this year. It premiered at Canneseries earlier in the year and actually took home Best Series, which tells you something before you’ve even pressed play.

Director Tom Kingsley is the person steering the ship. He’s the BAFTA-winning director behind Stath Lets Flats, which is another British comedy that rewards anyone who discovers it, and you can feel his hand at work throughout. The pacing is tight. The awkward silences are perfectly placed. And the tone never tips too far in either direction, which in a show like this is everything.

Walker and Clement

Now, let’s talk about Nicola Walker and Jemaine Clement, because this show lives and dies on those two.

Nicola Walker I’ve only ever seen in one place before this, and that’s the British police drama Unforgotten. She was in the first four seasons of that show as DCI Cassie Stuart, and she was outstanding in it. Her character actually died at the end of Season Four, a joint decision between her and the writer, Chris Lang, and honestly, the show hasn’t been quite the same since. She’s that kind of actor. She makes everything around her better just by being in it. And I’ll be straight with you, Alice in this show is nothing like Cassie Stuart. Nothing. She’s playing a woman who is sometimes genuinely awful, who schemes and manipulates and refuses to accept reality. And Walker plays it with this incredible mix of self-awareness and total obliviousness. You feel for Alice even when she’s doing something terrible, which is a very hard thing to pull off.

Then there’s Jemaine Clement. And look, I’ll put my cards on the table: I’m a bit of a fan. He’s a good Kiwi lad, and I’ve watched his career for a long time. I grew up with Flight of the Conchords, which is still one of the great television comedy experiments. But the thing about Jemaine is that he doesn’t just do anything for the sake of it. The projects he picks always feel deliberate. There’s a specificity to his choices. And Steve is a brilliant example of that: this slightly tragic, deeply well-meaning hairdresser who is genuinely in love with Izzy and refuses to be bullied out of it. There’s a sadness underneath the comedy that Jemaine carries throughout, and it makes the character feel real in a way that elevates the whole show.

If you want to go back and explore his earlier work, I’d point you straight to What We Do in the Shadows, the 2014 film, not the TV series. He co-wrote and co-directed it with Taika Waititi, and they both star in it. It’s a mockumentary about vampire flatmates in Wellington, and it’s absolutely brilliant. And then there’s Eagle vs Shark, which is Taika Waititi’s first feature, back in 2007. Jemaine plays a character called Jarrod, this wonderfully awkward, slightly deluded video game store clerk, and it’s a film that’s not for everyone, but if you spot it on a streaming service on a quiet Friday night and you’re in the mood for something genuinely weird and funny and oddly touching, give it a go.

What the Show Gets Right

So let’s talk about what the show actually does well, because there’s a lot.

The comedy in Alice and Steve works because it’s never mean-spirited. Alice is doing terrible things, but the show understands why she’s doing them. She’s terrified of losing the two most important people in her life at the same time. That’s a fear everyone can understand, even if her methods are completely out of order. The escalation through the six episodes feels earned. Each time you think Alice can’t possibly go further, she does. And the show keeps finding new angles to explore. There’s a hospital sequence in the middle of the season that turns what could have been a throwaway scene into something surprisingly tender between Alice and Steve, a reminder of how deep that friendship actually runs even as they’re at each other’s throats.

The writing also does something clever with the supporting cast. Joel Fry plays Daniel, Alice’s husband, and he’s this sweet, gentle, slightly oblivious presence who functions almost as the audience surrogate, the person watching the chaos unfold and not quite believing what he’s seeing. And Yali Topol Margalith as Izzy is much more than the show could have gotten away with. Izzy isn’t a naive young woman being taken advantage of. She’s confident, sharp, and she actively pursued this relationship. The show refuses to make her a victim, which keeps the moral landscape of the story genuinely complicated.

The Moment That Stays With You

There’s one beat I keep coming back to, and this is the Frame 70 Moment for me.

Right at the end of the season, at the wedding, there’s a moment between Alice and Steve that strips everything else away. All the scheming, all the rivalry, all the passive aggression, and you just see two people who have been through everything together and are terrified of what comes next. It’s maybe thirty seconds. But after five episodes of watching them fight, it lands like a punch. That’s the moment where the show stops being a comedy and becomes something else entirely. It earned it. That moment is why you stick with the six episodes.

I won’t get into where things land by the final scene. What I will say is that the season ends on a cliffhanger that is properly dramatic, the kind that makes you immediately want to know if there’s a second season confirmed. I don’t know that answer yet. But I’d be genuinely disappointed if this was all we got.

Are there things that don’t quite work? A couple of small ones. There are moments in the middle of the season where the escalation feels slightly forced, Alice pushing things further than even the logic of the show seems to allow. And occasionally the tone wobbles in a way that takes a second to settle back. But these are minor. They’re the kind of notes you’d have on any six-episode season that’s trying to do as much as this one is.

If you love the kind of British comedy-drama that doesn’t treat you like an idiot, this is absolutely your show. All six episodes are on Disney Plus right now, hopefully available in your corner of the world, and at around thirty minutes each, you’ve got no excuse not to give it a go tonight.