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Alice and Steve, the new “wrongcom” starring Nicola Walker and Jemaine Clement, starts like the story of a lifelong friendship between two 50ish exes. They went out for a short time, a million years ago, and ever since have been platonically inseparable. In one of the first scenes, Alice (Walker) tells Steve (Clement) that she loves him so much that if he were ever drowning, she’d hollow out her own mother’s body and use it as a canoe. Alice and Steve go to funerals, get drunk, talk frankly about their disappointments, devise ill-advised solutions, take cocaine but only once every epoch; all the stuff of a loving friendship is here.
But creator Sophie Goodhart also uses it to put every kind of relationship under the microscope. “It’s every stage of love Sophie is looking at,” says Walker. So it’s also about the doldrums of a long marriage, between Alice and Daniel (Joel Fry). And it’s about first love going exquisitely well for Dom, Alice and Daniel’s teenage son, until they take an edible and everything goes awry. Unavoidably, though, all the fireworks are around one love story – and how it puts paid to Alice and Steve’s relationship.
After one of those overwrought funerals, Steve gets off with Alice’s daughter Izzy (Yali Topol Margalith). He’s in his 50s, she is 26. “To me,” Clement says, “that’s not the biggest thing. To me, it’s the relationship between Steve and his friend and that it’s his friend’s daughter.” Goodhart doesn’t really think it’s about age difference at all, though she caveats that: “I should also admit that my husband is 14 years younger than me. What I like about the premise,” she adds, “is the complete explosion. It completely breaks everything. It scorches the entire area.”
After watching Alice and Steve, I had a lot of conversations with lifelong male friends, and they all ended at, if they ever got off with my daughter, the sheer heat of my fury would reduce them to ash. “You do always feel that your character’s right when you’re playing them,” says Walker, and that chimes with her body of work, certainly on TV – she’s often a DCI (Unforgotten) or a lawyer (The Split) or a vicar (Collateral), which is to say, she’s always in the right. “But I really felt it with Alice, that I would do the same in her situation. I would do more. I would draw blood.”
Walker’s utter credibility, coupled with her white-hot rage, is fingers-over-your-eyes engrossing to watch, but it only works because of Clement’s very specific comic chemistry and tendency towards surrealism. “I started off thinking of him as a cad,” he says, “but I quickly dropped that, probably within the first day. Because it’s more of a dilemma if he’s actually thinking about what his friend is feeling.” If he’d been even 5% player, it would have been tawdry. “He’s not grooming Izzy,” says Goodhart. “If anything, Izzy is the one who has slightly more power.”
Anyway, long story short and no spoilers, Alice goes full metal jacket. She has social events on a cocktail of rosé and dismay with a mind to humiliating Steve and making an unbearable atmosphere for everyone else.
“Every time I read a British script,” says Clement, “sometimes I don’t understand what the joke is. And then I remember: ‘Oh, they’re British, it’s embarrassing.’ British actors will be playing with such pained embarrassment, it’s another level. And that will be funny.” There’s a whole sidebar of toe-curl, as Steve tries to ingratiate himself with Izzy’s friends, and they’re torn between live-and-let-live and astonishment at the appalling stuff gen Xers just casually come out with. “Different generations are almost like we’re from different countries,” says Clement. “We have such different sets of rules.”
Alice sets out to destroy Steve from the ground up, starting with his career, which she obliterates at a stroke. He’s a hairdresser to the stars, and it only takes one tip to a gossip columnist revealing a celebrity’s secret for him to be dropped like a stone.
“I love the idea of them being stripped down, like [the film] The War of the Roses,” says Goodhart. “That idea of, will you still fight when you’ve got nothing left?” Walker’s performance is a raw mashup of pure fury and mystified indignation. “Why doesn’t everyone realise that I’m right? I’m the only one marching in time to the band,” Walker says.
Clement thinks that Goodhart and the director Tom Kingsley (who directed the comedy hit Ghosts) were like dark and light: “She’s nice but she has a really spiky and dark sense of humour, and Tom’s influence keeps it fun.” There are definitely tense moments when you can’t imagine how Alice and Steve, Izzy and Alice, Alice and Daniel will knit back together, and don’t know if that’s even for the best. If it ever skirts close to the hokey values of Love Actually – the heart wants what it wants, who are we to judge? – it veers off somewhere more complicated, until it’s more about mortality and marriage and selfishness than it is about romance.
“I don’t understand romantic love,” says Goodhart, “100% every single day, ‘I love you, and I will always behave in that loving way’. Marriages go through phases where you think: ‘I’m not totally in love with you. We’re just side by side and we’re living very well, and we’re on top of it.’ I wanted to look at love in all its different shapes and sizes.”
Throughout, there’s Alice and Steve’s backstory – they dated when they were young, which should make the whole thing even more ick, but there’s so much else going on that you slide over it. “They really played in their early 20s,” Goodhart says, “just a gorgeous, manic chaos.” Drugs come up a lot, in a way that you don’t see much in this genre of TV – heightened domestic comedy. “I don’t take drugs,” says Clement, “but I’ve definitely been offered a lot of drugs. It is realistic that people take drugs. I can tell you that.” What’s refreshing is not so much that class As are depicted as a realistic, if outlier part of a normal-ish life. Rather, that Alice can have an ambiguous relationship with delinquency – “She’s hidden the 20-year-old drugs, so there’s a bit of shame,” says Walker. “But despite it, she had no shame in digging it out. With her husband saying, ‘Are you sure you want to do that? You got very paranoid last time.’ It’s absolutely brilliant.” Yet this doesn’t dent her maternal identity at all.
I guess you could counter, post-Motherland and Amandaland, that the modern notion of mothering as a state of total self-abnegation has already been capsized. Nevertheless, this feels challenging and original, particularly when, their enmity at its height, Alice and Steve have to wrangle a houseful of teens who’ve all had a psychedelic, edible-related mishap. These two friends, at each other’s throats – she having a slow-motion breakdown, he weakly trying to please himself and everyone else – suddenly show their true competence, making a large number of people feel OK about some incredibly weird sensations, with calm, cheerful authority. “They’re like the A-team in that moment,” says Kingsley.
It sounds schmaltzy to say that this is fundamentally about friendship; it’s both more general than that – scoping out that a platonic relationship can be far hotter and more passionate than a marital one – and more specific. “I often see that with my female friends,” says Goodhart, “that they will have a very close friend and their husbands won’t.” That might not look like a cute gender divide, it might look like the husband feeling lonely and devalued, which is certainly the story of Alice’s marriage, with an endearing but infuriating meekness emanating from Daniel. “Do you have a best friend?” Goodhart suddenly asks Kingsley, and he says: “I think my best friend is the woman I was in a relationship with before I came out.” Goodhart and I nod to signify that that is acceptable, and he looks really relieved.
It’s a cast stacked full of what we used to call “new men” (in the 90s) – put-upon Daniel, lovestruck Dom, hapless Steve. “I feel there’s been a lot of stuff about toxic masculinity, and I wasn’t interested at all in talking about that,” says Goodhart.
Alice and Steve had a life of its own while they were shooting it, Clement says, the grey area of its sexual ethics bleeding into a quicksilver atmosphere: “Even from what we filmed, you could make one Alice and Steve that’s purely drama, or one that’s just jokes.” If you fundamentally can’t get past your outrage at the best friend/daughter romance, well, Alice resolves (definitely not in the way you think) by realising “she should have trusted her daughter, because she made her daughter. So her daughter was bound to find the right way.”
Perhaps that’s the real inquiry: more than the impossibility of marriage, love and friendship, the work of believing your mid-20s children could ever be capable adults. Not least because that’s also the last description you’d ever use of Alice and Steve themselves.
Alice and Steve is on Disney+ from 8 June.
