*Premise spoilers*
Despite having plenty of Joel Fry’s back catalog to get through, there’s still something about new-new projects from him that excites me. This Hulu/Disney+ “wrong-com” just came out this week, so the older reviews I have on deck are on hold for the time being. New stuff takes precedent! Episode 1 has me on the fence for multiple reasons, but I’m crossing my fingers that, at minimum, there will be more/better material to come for Joel Fry.
Alice and Steve have been best friends for over 30 years. On a night out of drinking and drugs after a friend’s funeral, divorced Steve confesses to married-with-kids Alice, “I wish I was in love and…and had a baby!” Recognizing that women in their 50s can’t have babies, Alice sets out to find Steve a younger woman. Unfortunately for everyone involved, Steve finds one on his own: Alice’s 26-year-old daughter Izzy, who’s just moved back home after a tough breakup. Steve and Izzy have a drunken hookup, and in the sober light of day, both are well aware of how badly Alice would take this revelation.
So…yeah. It’s dicey from the start. The whole “let me find you a younger woman” thing already feels weird, given that Alice also immediately jumps to looking for 20-somethings. When she sends Steve to chat up a 20-something at the bar, he quickly realizes they have nothing in common. If it’s a question of fertility, there’s no reason he couldn’t have looked for someone who was 35 or 40, someone he might be more likely to share interests with. But of course, before any further search can happen, he and Izzy have their lonely drunken encounter. And if the thought of dating someone half his age seemed iffy, the thought of dating his best friend’s daughter seems even worse. He’s known Izzy all her life, and even if these sudden feelings are a newfound thing for both of them, it still feels creepy. Not to mention, there’s the obvious potential fallout to his friendship with Alice.
I do like stories about platonic relationships, although this one is clearly about to get very thorny very quickly. The episode sets up Alice and Steve’s friendship pretty well. The dynamic between Nicola Walker and Jemaine Clement feels real and lived-in—you can buy that these are two people who’ve known each other forever and have offered cheerleading, tough love, and wild fun over the years. But at the same time, we also see how they can enable each other or be codependent. The situation seems primed for an implosion, a perfect storm of these two bringing out the worst in each other. We’ll see how it goes.
Since Joel Fry is a regular on the show, we’ll go ahead and get started with characters of the week. Let’s kick things off with Nicola Walker as Alice. The first description that comes to mind with Alice is simply “a lot.” She is a lot, although to be fair, she spends a good portion of this episode drunk and/or high. But sober Alice comes in pretty hot too. In particular, she latches on hard with her affections—she asks Izzy, “Is it selfish that I’m so happy that you’re back?”, wonders if she’s allowed to kill Izzy’s ex-boyfriend, and blows up Steve’s phone when she can’t get a hold of him. Put that together with being quick to spiral, and it’s not much of a stretch to realize that Alice will turn nasty if she feels betrayed by one of “her” people.
Joel Fry plays Alice’s husband Daniel. As seems to be typical with many of his TV roles, Fry plays a pretty minor role in the pilot, but hopefully the pattern will hold of him getting a lot more to do in subsequent episodes. Here, Daniel appears in several scenes, but he’s only really featured in one of them.
After the funeral, Alice and Steve go out and get sloshed with their mutual friends. The two of them stop by Alice’s place in the middle of the night so she can grab the baggie of coke she keeps under her bed before hitting the town again. While looking for the coke, she wakes up Daniel, so our first look at them as a couple is extremely mismatched—she’s drunk, wired, and boisterous, while he’s groggy and a little confused. Daniel reminds Alice how anxious she got the last time she used coke, and when she insists, “Steve is like, he’s really upset, and I just feel like I should be there for him,” he gives her a bemused smile and says, “You’re such a good friend.” Alice crawls onto the bed at one point, straddling and kissing Daniel before distractedly pushing his face away. You get the sense that she’s an enthusiastic but irresponsible whirlwind and he’s a mild, pragmatic guy who mostly manages to roll with his wife’s chaotic energy. But again, this scene introduces us to them as a couple while Alice is exuberantly drunk and Daniel just woke up, so the contrast might not be quite as pronounced under normal circumstances.
One other scene I want to mention. Daniel doesn’t have any lines in it and spends most of his limited screentime out-of-focus, but I still enjoy it for Joel Fry’s non-verbal acting. The morning after Alice and Steve’s wild night out, Alice has a conversation with Izzy while Daniel is in the background making breakfast. At first, he’s just chopping vegetables, then hesitates a bit before going to the fridge, and his body language unmistakably conveys the sense of, What am I missing/forgetting? Hmmm… Ah, that’s it! He’s not remotely the focus of the scene—Daniel is literally a blurry figure in the background—but Fry’s physicality still tells you where his head is at, and I just love that!
Okay, first impressions on Alice and Steve:
Accent Watch
Southern British English.
Recommend?
In General – So far, it’s dubious. I haven’t been fully sucked in, and I’m guessing things are about to get pretty unpleasant. As we go on, I’ll have to see if I think the show is worth whatever ugliness is on the way.
Joel Fry – A tentative maybe. I like what we’ve seen of Daniel so far, even though we don’t get much. I’m hoping that he’ll have more to do in future episodes and this won’t end up being a thankless role for him!
Warnings
Thematic elements (including a sexual relationship with a creepy/troubling setup,) language, sexual content, and drinking/drug use.
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