The British entertainment press has officially lost its mind over Alice and Steve. For weeks, the lazy critical consensus has hummed a familiar, congratulatory tune: Nicola Walker is a national treasure, Jemaine Clement is a deadpan genius, and their new Disney+ "wrong-com" is a brave, refreshing explosion of female rage that global audiences need to catch up on.
It is a comforting narrative. It is also entirely wrong.
Let’s be brutally honest about what Alice and Steve actually is. It is a show built on a radioactive premise—a middle-aged man sleeping with his lifelong best friend’s 26-year-old daughter, whom he has known since infancy—that completely lacks the courage of its own convictions. Instead of interrogating the genuine, uncomfortable power dynamics of an intergenerational relationship rooted in family history, the series chickens out. It soft-pedals the horror, turning a potentially sharp psychological drama into a toothless, repetitive sitcom full of screaming matches and cheap substance gags.
Praising this show as a milestone for television or a triumph for Nicola Walker doesn’t just lower the bar for prestige comedy. It fundamentally misunderstands what makes great, transgressive art work.
The Myth of the "Refreshing" Rage Arc
The loudest praise leveled at the series centers on Nicola Walker’s performance as Alice. Critics claim it is "magnetic" and "therapeutic" to watch a middle-aged woman completely lose her mind, throwing dignity out the window to destroy her best friend's life.
I have watched showrunners burn millions of production dollars chasing the ghost of Fleabag or Succession, mistakenly believing that if you just make a character unhinged and deeply selfish, the audience will mistake it for depth. That is the trap Alice and Steve falls into from the jump.
Alice’s character arc is non-existent. She begins the first episode in a state of screeching, unbridled fury, and she stays exactly there for six grueling half-hour episodes. There is no nuance, no escalation, and no structural development. It is an exhausting, flat line of broad-brush outrage.
To call this a "refreshing showcase of female rage" insults the intelligence of the viewer. Rage on television is only interesting when it has a target, a cost, or a purpose. When a character spends an entire series acting like a flatly written shrew, executing borderline-imbecilic plots to sabotage a career, it ceases to be a character study. It becomes a caricature. Walker is an immensely skilled actor—anyone who watched her iron-willed restraint in Unforgotten or the emotional fractures of The Split knows this—but the material here gives her nothing to play but a single, loud note.
The Absolute Absence of Chemical Reaction
Then there is the central engine of the show: the relationship between Steve (Jemaine Clement) and Alice’s daughter, Izzy (Yali Topol Margalith).
To buy into the stakes of Alice's fury, the audience needs to believe that Steve and Izzy possess an overwhelming, undeniable connection—something so intense that it forces a weak, lonely man to burn his most sacred thirty-year friendship to the ground.
Instead, the on-screen chemistry between Clement and Margalith is absolute zero. Clement looks profoundly embarrassed throughout the entire affair, playing Steve not as a complex man gripped by an inappropriate passion, but as a spineless sad-sack who stumbled into a bed and cannot find the exit.
The scripts try to overcompensate for this glaring void by repeatedly screaming at the audience that the sex is incredible and that they share a unique bond because Izzy likes Willie Nelson. It is a classic creative failure. If you have to tell the audience four times an episode that two characters are wildly infatuated because their physical performances suggest they are waiting for a bus together, the text has failed.
Consider a thought experiment. Imagine a version of this show where Steve is played not as a harmless, quirky Gen-Xer who "just wants to be loved," but as someone acutely aware of his influence. Imagine if the show actually explored the psychological friction of a 26-year-old dating a man who held her as a baby. That would be a dark, transgressive, brilliant piece of television.
But creator Sophie Goodhart runs away from the very "ick" factor she engineered. By watering Steve down into a pathetic, well-meaning idiot, the show strips the entire conflict of its weight. There are no real stakes because there is no real danger.
Dismantling the "People Also Ask" Illusions
The mainstream commentary surrounding the launch of this series relies on a couple of flawed premises that need to be dismantled immediately.
"Is Alice and Steve an accurate depiction of modern intergenerational relationships?"
Absolutely not. The show positions the conflict as a simple generational misunderstanding, complete with agonizingly cringe scenes of Steve trying to use modern slang with Izzy's twentysomething friends.
This completely misses the mark on how power dynamics function. A real-world relationship with this specific layout is not a series of wacky, live-and-let-live misunderstandings about culture; it is an emotional minefield of grooming subtext, shattered boundaries, and deep familial betrayal. By treating the age gap as a mere sitcom obstacle—like a disapproving father-in-law or a bad habit—the series insults the gravity of its own premise.
"Does the show break new ground for streaming comedies?"
Only if your definition of "new ground" is recycling 90s sitcom tropes wrapped in modern Disney+ production values.
The show features an excruciating dinner party sequence that reviewers have hailed as a masterpiece of awkward comedy. In reality, it is a sequence we have seen a thousand times before: characters getting drunk, air out secrets in the most public way possible, and shouting over a roast chicken. It is predictable, loud, and lazy. The only truly compelling elements of the show belong to the background—specifically the quiet, moving performance of Joel Fry as Alice's suffering husband, Daniel, and the isolated teenage romance of her son, Dom. But these elements are pushed to the margins to make room for more repetitive shouting matches between the leads.
The Real Cost of the Lazy Consensus
Why does it matter that the critical consensus is wrong about Alice and Steve? Because rewarding creative cowardice ensures we get more of it.
When major platforms take a genuinely provocative idea and immediately sand down the edges to make it palatable, it is bad enough. But when the critical establishment claps its hands and calls it "sublime" and "challenging," it signals to writers and executives that they do not actually have to do the hard work of writing complex, uncomfortable drama. They just need a flashy logline, two recognizable names on the poster, and a lot of shouting.
The show tries to resolve its unearned conflict with a ridiculous, hyper-stylized ending involving a house full of teenagers having a psychedelic edible mishap. It is a desperate bid for a heartwarming resolution where Alice and Steve suddenly use their "calm, cheerful authority" to save the day, proving that deep down, they are still a great team. It is unauthentic, unearned, and utterly ridiculous.
Stop pretending Alice and Steve is a masterpiece of dark comedy. It is a toothless, exhausting misfire that wasted a spectacular cast because it lacked the spine to confront the monster it created.
