‘I would draw blood’: Alice and Steve probes friendship, sex and revenge

Alice and Steve, a new “wrongcom” starring Nicola Walker and Jemaine Clement, begins with the story of a lifelong friendship between two 50ish exes who have been platonically inseparable since a brief relationship long ago. Early scenes underline the intimacy and oddity of that bond — Alice tells Steve she loves him so much she’d hollow out her own mother’s body and use it as a canoe — and the series uses their relationship to examine other forms of love, from the doldrums of a long marriage to a teenage son’s first romance undone by an edible.

Everything shifts when Steve sleeps with Alice’s daughter Izzy, in her mid-20s; Sophie Goodhart says the result “completely breaks everything” and “scorches the entire area.” Walker, who admits she would “do more” and “draw blood” in Alice’s shoes, plays a woman whose white-hot rage moves into calculated humiliation, even destroying Steve’s career as a celebrity hairdresser with a single tip to a gossip columnist.

alice, steve, nicola walker, jemaine clement, wrongcom, friendship, revenge, izzy, gossip columnist, sophie goodhart