This wrong-com is intentionally icky – and it’s not the age gap I have a problem with

Alice and Steve ★★★

It’s a bold move to build your comedy on Alice and Steve’s taboo-breaking premise: a middle-aged man starts dating the daughter of his best friend, who at 26 years old is younger than their friendship.

Billed as a “wrong com”, this six-part UK series starring Nicola Walker (The Split) and Jermaine Clement (What We Do in the Shadows) is intentionally icky – a cringe-filled comedy in which Alice’s (Walker) disgust with Steve (Clement) unleashes all-out warfare between the two.

As the duo weaponises decades of shared secrets and their lives begin to crumble, Alice and Steve almost resembles a British season of Netflix’s Beef, albeit trading bloodshed for the violent secondhand embarrassment of Peep Show or The Thick of It.

It’s all a sharp turn from the show’s first episode, in which the duo’s drug-fuelled night out after a funeral shakes off a sombre day. Alice and Steve are lifelong friends who briefly dated aeons ago. They are equally bright, witty and charming and eager to draw people in, but less so to share the light.

Both are creatives in image-obsessed industries (Alice is a fashion designer, while Steve is a hair stylist, or, if you will, groomer) and their success has required a level of self-centred immaturity, something they don’t need to apologise for with each other.

It’s Steve’s light – and his “weirdly hot” looks – that sees Alice’s daughter Izzy (Yali Topol Margalith) pursue him that same night, leading the charge when he’s sleeping on their family couch.

Their relationship, also led by Izzy, is portrayed as genuine, with Steve seemingly more misguided and lonely than malicious – though very few people around them are convinced. It’s undeniably uncomfortable that Steve was like an uncle figure for Izzy, tagging along on family holidays when she was a child.

No wonder Alice goes mad. White-hot with rage and disappointment, she’s determined to break them up – first, with a cross-generational dinner party, where Alice brings up Steve’s love of Woody Allen films in front of Izzy’s Gen Z friends. When that fails, she settles for ruining Steve’s life, and he retaliates.

It’s much funnier than its premise, with Walker’s roaring fury as Alice playing well off Clement’s understated comic presence and ultra-dry one-liners. There’s lots to like here, with some big laughs and intriguing relationship dynamics that offer room for a second season.

As laid out in its title, Alice and Steve isn’t terribly interested in Izzy, more a plot-driver than a fleshed-out character. Creator Sophie Goodhart is more interested in exploring selfishness than the ethics of its age-gap relationship, which makes sense: she’s said repeatedly in interviews that she doesn’t see Steve as a groomer.

But the possibility lingers in the show itself. While it would be boring to require television to offer clear moral rulings on its characters, Izzy’s lack of interiority – granted to secondary characters such as her brother or step-dad – has bugged me more and more in the days after finishing Alice and Steve, overshadowing the laughs.

Alice and Steve is now streaming on Disney+.

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