Hulu’s “Alice & Steve” is wild, uneven, very funny, and surprisingly insightful, even if it’s the kind of show you think you might hate.
The first episode establishes the premise: Alice (Nicola Walker) and Steve (Jemaine Clement) are longtime friends now in their fifties. He’s recently divorced, and she’s married with two kids, one in high school and one in her late twenties. The friends are not exactly rule followers—that first episode includes an emergency trip to the vet after Steve’s dog eats part of the 50-somethings’ cocaine.
That first episode has a rollicking tone with physical humor, off-color gags, and the leads’ charisma jumping off the screen. It ends after Steve sleeps with Alice’s grown daughter, Izzy (Yali Topol Margalith), who tells her mom the first chance she gets, promising that her May-December romance is the real deal.
It’s hard to see any chance this show could handle the intricacies of this setup. The tone is too wild, the relationship too gently handled—if you could set up such an age-gap in the most positive way possible, that’s what “Alice & Steve” does. But it’s hard to escape the ick of a grown man sleeping with a person 20+ years his junior, whom he has watched grow up since she was a baby.
It’s “Woody Allen and Soon-Yi Previn” bad. And yes, the 6-part series does go there. You see, because as sure as the pilot will make you think this premise was unredeemable, the show proves you wrong.
The next two episodes are a thoughtful romp, challenging Steve in all the ways it needs to while keeping Izzy’s agency and Alice’s rightful fury in the forefront. Alice is right about Steve needing to leave her daughter alone. But she is delightfully wrong about pretty much everything else. She’s mean to nearly everyone, including her kind husband, played here by a pensive Joel Fry. She delights in drama, curating scenes to make everyone uncomfortable around her.
Meanwhile, Steve is as oddly charming as you’d expect for Clement, whose schtick has been charming for decades (though “Flight of the Conchords” hasn’t aged as well as one hopes). Izzy calls him “weirdly hot,” and that continues to be true, even as Alice sets up a generational conflict that, yes, includes Steve’s thoughts on Woody Allen. That debate happens over Trivial Pursuit, in the kind of set piece that could come off as horribly clichéd in the wrong hands. But with a script by Sophie Goodhart of “Bad Education,” this series totally pulls it off.
This push-pull between my (Alice’s, her husband’s, and maybe a little bit Izzy’s friends’) judgment of Steve’s action and the beauty of their budding relationship could have powered the whole season. Maybe two!
But instead, in episode four, the show feels a need to juice the plot. Like the first installment, those 31 minutes are a hackneyed snooze. If you allow yourself to guess the most cliched plot points to occur next, just know they’re coming at the series’ midpoint.
But “Alice & Steve” surprises you yet again. When it’s not focusing on setting up its plot, this show is delightfully unhinged, managing to say quite a bit about our human condition—about stunted growth, family, and love.
Alice does not become a better person, per se, but she does grow, and we do come to understand why these people love her. Steve manages to actually take a hard look at himself from his own point of view, no longer outsourcing too many of his decisions to Alice or whatever other strong woman is around to lead him.
And Izzy, well, she remains mostly an idea, but one played with an alluring depth by Margalith. Which is good because the three central performances had to work if this show had any chance to succeed—and they really do. Clement is attractive, recalcitrant, wounded, and wrong in ways that make his character feel sympathetic even when he clearly knows better than to be doing what he’s doing.
In title, “Alice & Steve” is a two-parter, but really this is Walker’s show. She inhabits her chaos-agent role with such gusto and such vulnerability that you’ll want to reach through the screen and hug her or slap her. She’s helped by how the camera lingers on her face in both good lighting and bad, showing us what 50 actually looks like in a dynamic, impulsive woman who’s blowing up her life in a bid to protect her grown daughter from something she is actively (and consensually) pursuing.
It’s all somehow smarter than it should be and just as funny as you’d hope. Watch at your own risk.
Full season screened for review. Currently streaming on Hulu.
