‘Alice and Steve’ Review: Jemaine Clement and Nicola Walker Light Up Hulu’s Sharply Funny, Unexpectedly Touching Comedy

That Alice (Nicola Walker) would react badly to learning that Steve (Jemaine Clement), her ex-boyfriend turned best friend of 30 years, is dating her 26-year-old daughter (Yali Topol Margalith) was a given. For one thing, it’s hard to imagine who wouldn’t be weirded out by such a situation. For another, Alice is the kind of brash, impulsive, self-centered personality unlikely to take anything in stride, much less a piece of news as explosive as this one.

So even as she throws herself into petty vengeance, going to further and further extremes in her feud against Steve, it’s hard to say any of it feels unexpected — amusing, sure, and horrifying, maybe, but not unexpected. What does surprise about Hulu’s Alice and Steve, however, is the poignancy of the emotion behind it. Perfectly encapsulated by Walker’s barnburner of a performance, it lasts long after Alice’s rage has sputtered out.

The joyful, comfortable chemistry between Alice and Steve is obvious from the opening minutes of the premiere, written by creator Sophie Goodhart and directed by Tom Kingsley. When they’re together, even a funeral for a mutual friend becomes a reason to trade snarky jokes, get wasted on tequila shots and then tear it up at the club with an ancient stash of cocaine. “If there was a flood, I would husk out my own mother’s body and use it as a canoe to get you to safety,” she declares in a typically twisted but affectionate exchange. She’s joking, but she means it, too. Even more so than her own husband, Daniel (a lovable Joel Fry), it’s Steve who might be her true (platonic) soulmate.

But what neither of the forever friends see coming when Alice lets Steve crash on the couch that same evening is the sudden attraction that develops between him and Izzy (Margalith), who’s temporarily moved back home after a breakup. Though the connection is new and, Izzy and Steve both agree, a terrible idea, it’s strong enough that they deem it worth incurring the inevitable wrath of Alice by telling her.

And incur it they do. Over six half-hour episodes, Alice becomes obsessed with first ending the relationship, and when she can’t, with destroying Steve — to the point of neglecting her job responsibilities as well as her home life with the endlessly patient Daniel and their equally gentle teenage son, Dom (Tyrese Eaton-Dyce). Steve, after some cowering, gives as good as he gets, targeting Alice’s career, her marriage, her reputation.

It’s a cycle of escalation so pointless and petty it could have powered an entire season of Beef, and as with the Netflix series much of the fun derives from seeing just how self-destructive both parties can get — with plenty of laughs along the way, thanks to the cringe humor of hellish dinner parties or the lighter cracks from bystanders like Alice’s mother Val (Marcia Warren), whose reaction to the coupling is to jokingly proposition Steve and remark “how wonderfully French” it is of Steve to date his ex-girlfriend’s daughter.

The fact that all this madness is the fallout of a relationship that’s actually the weakest link of the story is both a bit baffling and possibly the point. On one hand, Alice and Steve is less interested in the ineffable magic that brings people together than the emotional baggage that threatens to pull them apart, and it’s clear that Izzy and Steve’s coupling has as much to do with his loneliness and her inability to be alone as it does their shared passions for spaghetti vongole, Willie Nelson and sex positions we only hear about in the vaguest of terms.

On the other, even if we don’t buy into the romance, we need to believe they do, however misguidedly — and neither the writing nor the chemistry run deep enough to sell this as the sort of overwhelming attraction that might inspire both these people to destroy their relationships with Alice. While Clement, as a co-lead, gets enough screen time to flesh out Steve’s particular sad-sack brand of selfishness, Margalith’s Izzy never stops feeling like a walking, talking plot device, to be detonated any time the story needs an extra boost.

Still, if the instigating incident feels overly contrived, the emotions it dredges up feel real enough to make up for it — and nowhere more so than in Walker’s fearless, ferocious performance. As Alice tears through the series with the chaotic force of a hurricane, Walker layers her swirling emotions so precisely that we understand the hurt disguised as hatred, the indignation that mellows into regret, the fear of loss fueling her campaign of terror, before Alice herself does.

In that, she’s not as alone as she might presume. Similar tensions lie at the heart of not only Steve and Izzy’s ill-advised relationship but Alice’s own flailing marriage to Daniel, Daniel’s growing bond with a sexually liberated coworker (Lydia Wilson’s Marni) and Dom’s flirtation with his school crush, Rome (Eilidh Fisher) — the latter left open-ended because labels are for old people, whereas young people understand that “life is fluid and defining something only limits it.”

Or so the kids claim. In a moment of vulnerability, Rome admits the truth to Alice: “I don’t want to need anyone.” It’s easier to run from the messiness of emotions than to confront the possibility that they might crush you. Alice, who understands this sentiment better than Rome can possibly know, responds with all the maternal wisdom she can muster. “Some people find love hard. And some people are just assholes,” she says. Alice and Steve’s most touching revelation, buried somewhere in all the vengeful hijinks and spiraling consequences, is that most of us know exactly what it’s like to be both.