Jemaine Clement, left, and Yali Topol Margalith star in Alice and Steve, streaming on Disney+ in Canada.Lara Cornell/Supplied
The wrong-com is an ascendent genre in the TV landscape.
Everywhere you look on the small streaming screen, characters in comedies keep dating characters they really shouldn’t be dating.
Professor-student relationships, in particular, have been a recurrent inciting incident in 2026. Examples include HBO Max’s Rooster (on Crave in Canada), Netflix’s Vladimir and Apple TV’s Margo’s Got Money Troubles.
A decade on from #MeToo, screenwriters seem hungry to explore age gaps and power imbalances without getting too dramatic about the subject. They’re more interested in what happens after the heart wants what it wants.
Alice and Steve, a new British comedy streaming on Disney+ in Canada, is the apex of comedies with an “it’s complicated” relationship status.
The six-part series from Sophie Goodheart has at its centre a romance between Izzy, a 26-year-old woman played by Yali Topol Margalith (to save you Googling: Yes, it’s Fiddler on the Roof Topol’s granddaughter!), and Steve, a 50-year-old man played by Jemaine Clement (Flight of the Conchords, What We Do in the Shadows).
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The difference in age is only one issue here. Steve is also the long-time bestie of Alice, Izzy’s mother. The two became friends after dating briefly more than 25 years ago.
Alice is played by the wonderful English actor Nicola Walker, who I’m most familiar with from crime dramas. The way her character spins out over her daughter dating her ex is brilliantly acted.
She pushes away her beloved daughter, turns on her old friend and then takes her feelings out on her timorous husband, Daniel (Joel Fry). Along the way to Alice losing her job and succumbing to day drinking, Walker manages to keep things as funny as possible.
What’s less credibly depicted is the relationship between Steve and Izzy.
Alice is played by English actor Nicola Walker, above.Lara Cornell/Disney+/Supplied
It comes on spontaneously one night when Steve, who is divorced, is sleeping over on the couch at Alice’s house after a funeral for a mutual friend. Izzy is back home after a gut-wrenching breakup with a boyfriend.
The two are both emotionally vulnerable and end up hooking up. The writing is at pains to make it clear that Izzy is more than just enthusiastically consenting to this – she makes the first move – and that she is of the exact age where her prefrontal cortex is fully developed.
But while there may have been a modicum of plausibility to this initial coupling on the page, on screen these actors can’t quite sell it. Viewers are simply supposed to buy not only that a single night together has led both to fall deeply in love – but that neither had prior romantic feelings toward each other.
Alice and Steve remains murky surrounding questions you may have. For instance, has Izzy ever called Steve “uncle”? He’s not a friend Alice has kept away from her kids, after all. He’s been in attendance at family Christmases and gone on holiday with them to Portugal.
Daniel, who is not Izzy’s biological father, raises these points during a trip to a nearby corner store partway through an awkward dinner party. But Steve shakes off the idea that he’s a groomer, and it’s only raised once more, in the context of a Tom and Jerry social-media war between him and Alice.
The possibility that Izzy and Steve’s relationship might be outright incest is completely elided until a late episode, where it’s raised for a shock laugh.
The famous antecedent of Woody Allen – the director of comedies who got together with his sort-of stepdaughter when he was 56 and she was 21 – is more explicitly raised. During a game of Trivial Pursuit, Alice outs Steve as a fan of Allen’s movies to Izzy’s Gen Z friends. Steve, a celebrity hairstylist, defuses the situation by calmly explaining that he’s had enough famous clients to know better than to expect media to tell the full story about them.
Alice and Steve invites its audience to feel sophisticated. What can you do? As long as Izzy is consenting, is there really anything to do?
The writing is of the humanistic live-and-let-live variety – and much of it is good. The exploration of the pressure points in Alice and Daniel’s marriage is well done, as is Daniel’s emotional affair with a colleague.
But it wasn’t enough for me to cry uncle. I couldn’t get over the ick.