TV Review: "Alice and Steve" Is a Comedy About Best Friends Turned Enemies
Hulu’s Alice and Steve arrives with a premise that sounds like the setup to a bad joke: What if your best friend started dating your adult daughter? The six-episode British import earns its laughs and its heartache in equal measure. It’s a show that knows exactly how absurd its central situation is, and it leans into that absurdity without ever losing sight of the genuine emotional stakes underneath.
Jemaine Clement (the voice of Tamatoa in Moana) plays Steve with a kind of hapless sincerity that makes him surprisingly easy to root for. His Steve isn’t a predator or a fool, he’s a man who has stumbled into something real and is terrified of letting it go, largely because he suspects he’s running out of chances. That fear is worn quietly but legibly, and it gives the comedy a grounded emotional center. His co-star brings equal energy to Alice, whose campaign against the relationship starts as broadly comic and gradually reveals something more painful: a woman who has spent decades projecting her own regrets onto the people she loves most.
The show is at its best when it weaponizes the intimacy of Alice and Steve’s friendship against them. These are two people who know each other completely, and that knowledge becomes ammunition. Their feud has a specificity to it that generic rivals couldn’t achieve, and the writing finds real comedy in the way long friendships calcify into assumption.
The supporting cast holds up well. Yali Topol Margalith as Alice’s daughter Izzy is treated like a co-lead, with the plot eventually showing her life beyond her mother and new boyfriend. Joel Fry as Daniel, Alice’s husband, functions as the show’s moral compass and gets a quietly effective arc of his own as his patience erodes and he learns to stand up for himself.
Where the show stumbles is in pacing. The middle episodes occasionally feel like they’re spinning their wheels to stretch the conflict, and a few reversals in episodes four and five arrive so rapidly that their emotional weight gets diluted. The drama in the final stretch is more ambitious than expected for what markets itself as a comedy, and not all of it lands cleanly.
The ending, in particular, is likely to divide audiences. It feels born of the “ride or die” nature of being best friends, with a shock-value twist that feels incongruous with the rest of the show’s tone. But I’m sure some will love it as is.
Alice and Steve is a more rewarding watch than its elevator pitch suggests. It’s funny, it’s occasionally surprising, and when it connects emotionally, it really connects. Clement, in particular, does some of his best work here.
I give Alice and Steve 4 out of 5 stars
Alice and Steve premieres June 8th on Hulu and Disney+ internationally.