Nicola Walker and Jemaine Clement make this friendship feud worth following, even when the revenge grows busy. The writing gives Walker’s anger more attention than the younger woman whose relationship has set it off.
Alice and Steve is worth an evening if watching adults behave badly is your sort of comedy. Sophie Goodhart starts with a friendship wrecked by Steve’s relationship with Alice’s daughter, then lets the resulting feud become a problem of its own. The premise is contrived, and the programme never quite makes it feel otherwise. But it does persuade us that these two people have had years of knowing each other, and that their falling-out costs them something.
Nicola Walker and Jemaine Clement supply most of that conviction. Their exchanges have the impatient familiarity of friends who no longer need to be careful, which makes the switch to deliberate cruelty believable. Goodhart’s sharper lines work because the actors make them sound like things said to someone specific, rather than jokes waiting for an audience. We can understand why Alice and Steve would once have enjoyed each other’s company, an essential piece of work for a series about them making each other miserable.
Walker is especially good at keeping Alice’s anger funny without making it harmless. We laughed at the sheer disproportion of her fury, then felt for her because the retaliation exposes how much she misses her friend. There is enough jealousy in the performance to complicate Alice’s claim to be acting simply as a concerned mother. Walker lets us see the selfishness without asking us to dismiss the hurt, and the writing gives her plenty of both.
Clement has the harder job of making Steve worth all this bother. He has to remain recognisable as the friend Alice valued while also giving her reason to be furious, and he sometimes seems underused beside the attention given to her rage. Tom Kingsley’s direction serves their exchanges well; the comedy is strongest when the performers establish just how personally every grievance is taken. As the revenge accumulates, there is a tendency to crowd out the ordinary pleasure of watching these two work, and some of the antics feel unnecessary.
The larger weakness is Izzy, played by Yali Topol Margalith. The daughter whose relationship starts the trouble gets less attention than the people arguing over it, leaving her too thinly written for the weight Goodhart puts on her choices. That matters particularly in an age-gap story where Alice’s concern and her possessiveness need to be distinguished. We want a clearer sense of what Izzy wants from Steve, since without it the series keeps asking us to judge a relationship it has only partly established.
Across six episodes, the mixture of revenge and wounded affection sometimes feels crowded. The tender passages are welcome, but they need breathing room that the escalating feud does not always allow. A comedy this interested in the damage friends can do ought to spend a little longer with the consequences before finding another opportunity for misbehaviour. Goodhart is more persuasive about the pain of being displaced than about the romance that does the displacing.
The friendship is convincing enough to carry those weaknesses for much of the series. As a revenge comedy, it offers the useful discomfort of understanding someone’s hurt while wishing they would stop acting on it, and Walker makes that feeling particularly strong. Expect more pleasure from the performances and the sharp exchanges than from the romantic complication. Try it for the feud, with the warning that the romance takes considerably more believing
