A wickedly funny and surprisingly moving comedy about friendship, jealousy, and the painful realization that the people we love don’t always belong to us.

Some relationships are so deeply woven into our lives that we stop questioning them. They become part of the furniture, part of the routine, part of the story we tell ourselves about who we are. That’s what makes Hulu’s Alice and Steve such an unexpectedly affecting piece of television. On the surface, it’s a comedy built around an outrageous premise: a woman discovers that her best friend of thirty years, who also happens to be her ex-boyfriend, has started dating her twenty-six-year-old daughter. The setup sounds like the beginning of a farce, and for long stretches it absolutely is. But beneath the chaos, the screaming matches, the petty acts of revenge, and the escalating war between two stubborn adults, the series is really asking a much sadder question. What happens when the person you thought would always be there suddenly starts building a life that no longer revolves around you?

That emotional core is what elevates Alice and Steve beyond its high-concept premise. Creator Sophie Goodhart understands that the real story isn’t the romance between Steve and Izzy. It’s the friendship between Alice and Steve, a relationship that has lasted longer than marriages, careers, and nearly every other connection in their lives. From the opening episode, Nicola Walker and Jemaine Clement establish a chemistry so effortless that you immediately understand why these two people have remained tethered to one another for decades. They speak a language entirely their own, bouncing between affection and sarcasm with the ease of people who know each other too well.

Their friendship feels lived in. It feels real. That’s what makes the fallout so painful.

Walker delivers one of the year’s best comedic performances, but calling it merely comedic almost undersells what she’s doing. Alice is loud, impulsive, selfish, irrational, and often completely insufferable. She’s also deeply wounded. Walker never asks the audience to excuse Alice’s behavior, but she makes us understand it. Every ridiculous decision, every act of sabotage, every attempt to blow up Steve’s relationship stems from a fear that feels painfully recognizable. Alice isn’t simply angry that Steve is dating her daughter. She’s terrified of being replaced.

As the season progresses, that fear becomes impossible to ignore. What begins as outrage slowly reveals itself as grief. Alice isn’t mourning a romantic relationship. She’s mourning a friendship that suddenly feels different. The person who has always been her emergency contact, her confidant, her partner in crime, has found a new center of gravity. That realization hurts more than she’s willing to admit.

Jemaine Clement is equally strong as Steve, although the character is intentionally more frustrating. Steve is a lonely man whose emotional maturity hasn’t quite caught up with his age. He isn’t malicious, and that’s what makes him interesting. Lesser shows would have turned him into a villain. Alice and Steve recognizes that real life rarely works that way. Steve genuinely cares about Alice. He also genuinely cares about Izzy. His problem is that he consistently underestimates the damage his choices create.

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Clement plays him with just enough vulnerability to keep him sympathetic even when he’s making objectively terrible decisions. The performance reminds you how good Clement can be when he’s given material that stretches beyond pure comedy.

The show’s biggest weakness is also its central plot engine. While we’re told repeatedly that Steve and Izzy share an undeniable connection, the relationship itself never feels quite as compelling as the show needs it to. Yali Topol Margalith does solid work with the material she’s given, but Izzy often feels less like a fully realized character and more like the catalyst designed to blow up Alice and Steve’s friendship. The romance works well enough to keep the story moving, but it never becomes the emotional centerpiece the way the series seems to occasionally want it to.

Thankfully, the writers appear aware of this. Rather than obsessing over the romance itself, the show focuses on the fallout it creates. That’s where Alice and Steve finds its voice.

The escalating feud between the two title characters becomes increasingly absurd as the episodes progress. Careers are threatened. Marriages are tested. Reputations are damaged. Small disagreements spiral into full-scale emotional warfare. At times, the series feels like a British cousin to Beef, capturing that same self-destructive impulse that causes intelligent people to make increasingly catastrophic decisions simply because they refuse to let something go.

The difference is that Alice and Steve is ultimately far more interested in vulnerability than vengeance.

Again and again, the series returns to the idea that relationships are frightening precisely because they matter. Whether it’s Alice and Steve’s friendship, Steve and Izzy’s romance, Alice’s marriage to Daniel, or the younger generation attempting to define their own identities, every storyline circles back to the same truth: loving someone means giving them the power to hurt you.

That’s a difficult idea to explore without becoming unbearably sentimental, but the show finds a delicate balance between sincerity and humor. Some of its funniest moments emerge from deeply uncomfortable situations. Dinner parties become battlefields. Family gatherings become hostage negotiations. Innocent conversations turn into emotional minefields. The cringe comedy is consistently effective because it never feels manufactured. These characters aren’t trapped in sitcom misunderstandings. They’re trapped inside their own emotional blind spots.

Joel Fry deserves special mention for bringing warmth and patience to Daniel, who could easily have become a thankless character. Instead, he serves as a reminder that while Alice is busy fighting for one relationship, she risks neglecting another. Marcia Warren nearly steals the entire series as Alice’s mother, delivering some of the show’s funniest lines while simultaneously acting as an unexpected voice of perspective.

What surprised me most about Alice and Steve wasn’t how funny it is. It was how deeply it understands friendship. Television has produced countless stories about romantic heartbreak, but far fewer about the devastation that comes when a friendship changes. The series recognizes that losing a best friend, even partially, can feel every bit as painful as losing a lover. Sometimes it’s worse. Romantic relationships come with the understanding that they may end. The best friendships trick us into believing they’ll last forever.

That’s the illusion Alice spends six episodes fighting to preserve.

By the time the finale arrives, Alice and Steve has evolved into something richer than its premise suggests. It’s still funny. It’s still messy. It’s still occasionally ridiculous. But it also becomes a thoughtful exploration of aging, loneliness, identity, and the complicated ways people cling to one another. The show understands that love and friendship are rarely clean, and that sometimes the people who know us best are also the people most capable of breaking our hearts.

What makes the series linger isn’t the scandalous relationship at its center. It’s the recognition that beneath all the chaos, Alice and Steve are simply two people struggling to accept that relationships evolve whether we’re ready for them or not.

In a television landscape increasingly filled with high-concept mysteries, sprawling fantasy worlds, and prestige dramas desperate to be important, Alice and Steve succeeds by focusing on something refreshingly human. It’s about the fear of being left behind, the difficulty of letting people change, and the uncomfortable truth that love often requires surrendering control.

The result is one of the year’s most charming surprises — a comedy that earns its laughs while quietly breaking your heart.

RATING: ★★★★☆

That's A Wrap

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Alice and Steve

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That's A Wrap | Alice and Steve |

“Friendship, jealousy, and heartbreak collide in one of the year’s funniest and most emotionally honest comedies.”

— Joanthan P Moustakas

CREDITS

Release Date: Monday, June 8
Cast: Nicola Walker, Jemaine Clement, Yali Topol Margalith, Joel Fry, Tyrese Eaton-Dyce, Eilidh Fisher, Marcia Warren, Lydia Wilson
Creator: Sophie Goodhart
Streaming on: Hulu