What to stream this week: An intentionally icky wrong-com, plus five more picks

Nicola Walker and Jemaine Clement’s taboo-breaking comedy will leave you with more questions than answers. Plus, another YA romance, a searing crime-thriller driven by desperation and a surprisingly deep dating show.

Alice and Steve ★★★ (Disney+)

It’s a bold move to build your comedy on Alice and Steve’s taboo-breaking premise: a middle-aged man starts dating the daughter of his best friend, who at 26 years old is younger than their friendship.

Billed as a “wrong com”, this six-part UK series starring Nicola Walker (The Split) and Jemaine Clement (What We Do in the Shadows) is intentionally icky – a cringe-filled comedy in which Alice’s (Walker) disgust with Steve (Clement) unleashes all-out warfare between the two.

As the duo weaponise decades of shared secrets and their lives begin to crumble, Alice and Steve almost resembles a British season of Netflix’s Beef, albeit trading bloodshed for the violent secondhand embarrassment of Peep Show or The Thick of It.

It’s all a sharp turn from the show’s first episode, in which the duo’s drug-fuelled night out after a funeral shakes off a sombre day. Alice and Steve are lifelong friends who briefly dated aeons ago. They are equally bright, witty and charming and eager to draw people in, but less so to share the light.

Both are creatives in image-obsessed industries (Alice is a fashion designer, while Steve is a hair stylist, or, if you will, groomer) and their success has required a level of self-centred immaturity, something they don’t need to apologise for with each other.

It’s Steve’s light – and his “weirdly hot” looks – that sees Alice’s daughter Izzy (Yali Topol Margalith) pursue him that same night, leading the charge when he’s sleeping on their family couch.

Their relationship, also led by Izzy, is portrayed as genuine, with Steve seemingly more misguided and lonely than malicious – though very few people around them are convinced. It’s undeniably uncomfortable that Steve was like an uncle figure for Izzy, tagging along on family holidays when she was a child.

No wonder Alice goes mad. White-hot with rage and disappointment, she’s determined to break them up – first, with a cross-generational dinner party, where Alice brings up Steve’s love of Woody Allen films in front of Izzy’s Gen Z friends. When that fails, she settles for ruining Steve’s life, and he retaliates.

It’s much funnier than its premise, with Walker’s roaring fury as Alice playing well off Clement’s understated comic presence and ultra-dry one-liners. There’s lots to like here, with some big laughs and intriguing relationship dynamics that offer room for a second season.

As laid out in its title, Alice and Steve isn’t terribly interested in Izzy, more a plot-driver than a fleshed-out character. Creator Sophie Goodhart is more interested in exploring selfishness than the ethics of its age-gap relationship, which makes sense: she’s said repeatedly in interviews that she doesn’t see Steve as a groomer.

But the possibility lingers in the show itself. While it would be boring to require television to offer clear moral rulings on its characters, Izzy’s lack of interiority – granted to secondary characters such as her brother or step-dad – has bugged me more and more in the days after finishing Alice and Steve, overshadowing the laughs.

Every Year After ★★★ (Amazon Prime Video)

Best known for action shows, Amazon is breaking big into romance – specifically, TikTok-approved YA spanning several summers in a small town. New series Every Year After has quite a lot in common with blockbuster hit The Summer I Turned Pretty.

Adapting the best-selling romance novel Every Summer After, the show stars Sadie Soverall as Percy and Matt Cornett as Sam, who are first loves reuniting after a decade. Percy returns to picturesque lake town Barry’s Bay for Sam’s mother’s funeral, nervous and quietly hopeful.

In eight episodes, Every Year After jumps between the present and past summers, starting in 2011, when a friendless, 13-year-old Percy first visits, meeting Sam and his older, cocky brother Charlie (Michael Bradway).

Designed for second-screen watching, it’s far from subtle. “I don’t know if I can face it...” says Percy, in the show’s first minutes. “My whole life is filled with regret because of choices I made, and how I left things with Sam, the love of my life.”

But Every Summer After does exactly what it sets out to do, complete with chiselled abs, 2010s needle drops and wistful stares (this is definitely a PG show). If you’re willing to be swept away, it’ll do the job.

Best in Show ★★★★ (HBO Max)

Originally released in 2000, this mockumentary about a prestigious dog show is comedic gold, with its all-star cast – including Eugene Levy, Catherine O’Hara, Jennifer Coolidge, Parker Posey and Jane Lynch – given a long leash to improvise. Co-written by Levy and Christopher Guest, Best in Show follows five prized pooches and their quirky owners, from a Southern ventriloquist (Guest) to flirty Cookie Fleck and her doting husband (O’Hara and Levy, decades before Schitt’s Creek). Made with absolute love for its characters, it’s ridiculous without ridicule.

To a Land Unknown ★★★★ (SBS On Demand)

Inspired by Palestinian refugees stranded without support in Athens, To a Land Unknown is a searing crime-thriller driven by desperation, reminiscent of Midnight Cowboy or Good Time. Directed by Danish-Palestinian Mahdi Fleifel, it focuses on Palestinian cousins Chatila (Mahmood Bakri) and Reda (Aram Sabbah). Stuck in limbo, they resort to muggings, sex work and scams to raise money for fake passports, hoping to meet their families in Germany. Frustrated, Chatila hatches a plan targeting other desperate refugees, the film empathetic to the idea that being stateless can lead people to lose their own humanity.

Swiping America ★★★ (HBO Max)

Following four queer singles from New York on a road-trip, Swiping America is a surprisingly deep dating show that sits closer to a documentary than Love Island. Created by the team behind HBO’s We’re Here (in which famous drag queens make over queer people in rural America), this series sends the group on dates in Honolulu, Austin, Miami and more cities not considered LGBTQ+ hubs. The dates can be contrived, but the connections aren’t. Conversations are increasingly fascinating and raw, depicting a diversity of queer identities without labouring the point.

Crimes of the Future ★★★ (Mubi)

Marking David Cronenberg’s return to body horror and sci-fi after 20 years away, this 2022 film is a cold and creepy dissection of the squelchy sub-genre of horror the Canadian filmmaker helped pioneer in the 1970s and ’80s (see: The Fly, Videodrome and Shivers). Starring Viggo Mortensen, Lea Seydoux and Kristen Stewart and imagining a future where humans are evolving in strange ways, Crimes of the Future is classic Cronenberg, but slightly disaffected. The plot, as do the characters, mixes sex with violence, asking what comes next.

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