Alice and Steve Review: Nicola Walker Hands Disney+ The Sharpest British Comedy Launch Of 2026
The honest test for any new British comedy in 2026 is whether it makes you laugh in the first ten minutes. Most do not. The last two years of homegrown sitcom have been so marinated in prestige sadness, tasteful awkwardness and slow-build pathos that “comedy” has started to feel like a marketing department’s accident. Then, six days into June, Disney+ drops Alice and Steve: six episodes of pettiness, jealousy, sabotage and one truly unforgivable family dinner. Any Alice and Steve review has to start by acknowledging the obvious. This is the first British comedy of the year that actually feels like a comedy, and the first since Stath Lets Flats went off the boil to take real glee in watching grown adults behave badly.
In This Article
- What the “wrong-com” label is really doing in this Alice and Steve review
- Nicola Walker is doing something here that no one else in British TV can quite do
- Clerkenwell Films, and why this feels like a peer to Baby Reindeer
- Where the series falters, and why it might not matter
- What this tells us about British comedy in 2026
- Verdict, and the streaming context
The premise sounds like a sitcom note rejected for being too on-the-nose. Alice, played by Nicola Walker, discovers that her best friend of thirty years – Jemaine Clement’s incurably charming Steve – has started sleeping with her 26-year-old daughter. The rest is six instalments of escalating revenge, sweetly delusional self-justification and the kind of dialogue that lands because nobody on screen seems to realise quite how badly they are behaving. Disney has branded the show a “wrong-com”, a label that sounds focus-grouped but, in this case, is the most accurate description anyone has come up with for what writer-creator Sophie Goodhart and director Tom Kingsley have actually built (Disney’s own UK press release uses the term as a billing line, which tells you how seriously they are taking it as a positioning play).
What the “wrong-com” label is really doing in this Alice and Steve review
It is tempting to dismiss “wrong-com” as marketing English, on a par with “dramedy” or the more recent “cringefest”. But spend an episode with Alice and Steve and the label starts to mean something specific. This is not the cringe of Fleabag, where the joke is the protagonist’s self-awareness. It is not the awkwardness of Stath Lets Flats, where misunderstanding is the engine. It is something older and stranger: comedy built around two people who refuse to be the adult in any given room, and a writers’ room willing to let them stay wrong for the full six episodes.
Goodhart, whose CV runs through Sex Education and a string of independent films before this, has written a script that takes its time being mean. Alice’s response to discovering the relationship is not a tearful confrontation. It is a quiet, escalating campaign of low-stakes sabotage: a forgotten birthday, a passive-aggressive dinner, a “concerned” conversation with her daughter that goes on three minutes too long. Steve, for his part, plays the lifelong-best-friend card so often it starts to feel like a tic. Neither of them is the villain. Neither of them is the wronged party. Both of them are extremely funny exactly because the show refuses to take sides.
Tom Kingsley directs every scene with the slightly off-centre framing he honed on Stath and Ghosts, and the comedy is paced for streaming. Episodes run a tight 28 to 34 minutes. Punchlines are buried in reaction shots. There is no laugh track and, crucially, no warm sitcom score telling you when a moment is meant to land. You either catch the joke or it goes past you. That is a confident piece of television. It is also a useful corrective to the British comedy habit, in 2026, of underlining every moment of feeling with strings.
Nicola Walker is doing something here that no one else in British TV can quite do
Walker has been the most reliably watchable actress on British television for the better part of a decade. Crime drama in particular has been kind to her; our round-up of the best British cosy crime of 2026 traces the genre her Unforgotten years helped keep respectable. From DCI Cassie Stuart in Unforgotten to Hannah Stern in The Split to her quietly brilliant lead in Annika, she has built a career on giving characters whose interiority is always visible without ever quite being explained. The trick she pulls in Alice and Steve is to put that same emotional precision in service of a character whose feelings are, on paper, completely unsympathetic.
Alice is jealous, possessive and convinced of her own reasonableness. In another actress’s hands, she would be a punchline or a cautionary tale. Walker plays her as a real person who has not yet noticed she is the problem. There is a scene in episode two where Alice rehearses, in her bathroom mirror, the casual question she plans to ask her daughter at dinner. The rehearsal goes through about fourteen drafts. She lands on “so, when did this all start?” – a question she then delivers, at dinner, with such studied innocence that her daughter visibly recoils. The whole sequence runs about ninety seconds. There are no jokes in it. It is the funniest thing in the episode.
The Hollywood Reporter’s review, published ahead of launch, called the show “sharply funny, unexpectedly touching” and reserved particular praise for Walker’s “barnburner of a performance”, noting that “the poignancy of the emotion behind it” outlasts Alice’s rage. That is generous but accurate. Walker is the reason this works. Without her, the wrong-com label collapses into smugness.
It is also worth saying that British television has spent the last five years figuring out what to do with Walker between leading roles. She is too distinctive for ensemble background work and too anti-glamorous for the kind of glossy thriller leads ITV keeps trying to cast her in. Alice and Steve is the first show since The Split that has built itself entirely around her register: dry, intelligent, alarmingly close to your most embarrassing friend. Disney+ has effectively rented her at a premium and let the writing earn the cost.
Clerkenwell Films, and why this feels like a peer to Baby Reindeer
The production company behind Alice and Steve is the most interesting structural fact about it. Clerkenwell Films, now wholly owned by BBC Studios after a 2021 acquisition, has spent the last decade quietly producing a run of shows that share almost no surface DNA but the same emotional ambition: The End of the F***ing World, Lovesick, Misfits, and most recently Baby Reindeer, the Netflix breakout that turned Richard Gadd into an internationally recognisable name and forced a public conversation about the limits of “based on a true story” storytelling.
The trade publication C21Media confirmed in its commissioning announcement that Clerkenwell were attached to Alice and Steve from the outset, with the company in active partnership with Disney+ for original British comedy. What that buys, on screen, is a recognisable house style. Clerkenwell shows do not flinch from making their protagonists hard to love. They take small, domestic premises and find the strangeness inside them. They tend to be cheaper than they look. And they almost always end up doing better critically than commercially – until, occasionally, the wider audience catches up.
Disney+ has been building out a British comedy slate for two years now, with mixed results. Rivals and Welcome to Wrexham have done well in the UK. Several quieter attempts have not. Alice and Steve is the first show in that slate that feels like Disney has bought into the British comedy tradition rather than asking British writers to assemble something that will work in Ohio. The wrong-com tag is, in that sense, a small act of confidence: a willingness to brand a niche subgenre rather than smooth it down. Whether the algorithm rewards that bet is a separate question.
Where the series falters, and why it might not matter
It would be dishonest to pretend the show is faultless. Episodes three and four sag noticeably. There is a subplot involving Alice’s neighbour, a former actor played to broad comic effect, that lands on the wrong side of cartoonish and slows the central feud to a crawl. Two scenes involving Steve’s professional life – he is, by trade, a moderately successful illustrator – feel like they were written for a different show and never quite stitched in. The daughter, Izzy, played with real intelligence by Yali Topol Margalith, is short-changed by a script that is mostly interested in Alice’s perspective. The show keeps reaching for her interiority and then pulling back, as if it is not sure it has earned the time.
The bigger structural problem is the ending. Without spoiling specifics, the final episode resolves the feud in a way that is plausible and, in its own muted way, moving – but also faintly conventional. After five episodes of being told this is a show where nobody gets to be the adult, watching one of them suddenly become the adult is a slightly disappointing landing. A second series, if Disney commissions one, will have to decide whether to undo that move or live with it.
None of which is fatal. Many of the best British comedies of the last decade have had wobbly midsections – Catastrophe, Back to Life, even Fleabag series one. The thing that survives is the cast chemistry and the specificity of the central premise, and on both those counts Alice and Steve is unusually strong. The chemistry between Walker and Clement, in particular, has the kind of lived-in warmth that you cannot fake in a casting room. They have apparently rehearsed together for years on stage. It shows.
What this tells us about British comedy in 2026
It is too early to call Alice and Steve the start of anything. One six-part wrong-com on Disney+ does not, on its own, reverse a half-decade of British comedy commissioning that has favoured prestige sadness over anything resembling jokes. But it is the most cheerful sign yet that the gap is being noticed. The BBC’s recently announced ensemble sitcom writers’ room, set in an NHS maternity unit in West Yorkshire and led by Jessica Knappett, is another. Ricky Gervais’s Netflix-bound animated comedy about feral British cats is, on a different level, a third.
What these have in common is not a shared sensibility – they are wildly different projects – but a willingness to put recognisable comic engines back on screen. Domestic feuds. Workplace farce. Talking animals. The basics. After a long period in which British television treated outright funniness as slightly embarrassing, the commissioners appear to be remembering that audiences turn up for it. They also remembered just in time. The 2026 BAFTA TV Awards saw Stephen Graham’s Adolescence sweep the drama categories, but the comedy categories were unusually thinly attended. There was almost nothing to nominate. Either that changes, or British comedy quietly contracts into a documentary niche.
Alice and Steve is also a useful reminder that streaming platforms now do most of the heavy lifting on adult British comedy. Channel 4, traditionally the home of risk-taking sitcom, has tightened its budget for original commissions. The BBC has been more cautious about half-hour comedy than it has been about drama. Disney+, Netflix and, increasingly, Apple TV+ have stepped into the gap. That is not, in itself, a bad outcome. But it changes what a British comedy looks like – bigger international cast, smoother production values, less of the local specificity that made The Office and Peep Show travel. Whether Alice and Steve is the model or the exception will become clearer over the back half of the year.
Verdict, and the streaming context
Disney+ has dropped all six episodes at once, which is the right call. The show is built for a Saturday afternoon and a confident binge, not a weekly drip. At 28 to 34 minutes per episode, the whole thing runs at just under three hours. That is the same total length as a slightly indulgent prestige drama like Two Weeks in August, but the experience is the opposite: tighter, sharper, far less pleased with itself. If you have been working through the recent slate of BBC One’s prestige offerings, this is a useful palate cleanser.
It also sits intriguingly against the wider state of UK drama in 2026, which has been dominated by sadness, dread and slow-burn ensemble pieces. Adolescence‘s BAFTA-decorated influence is everywhere. Alice and Steve is one of the few major releases this quarter that is not, in some sense, in dialogue with that mood. It is happy to be small, funny, occasionally cruel and unrepentantly domestic. Set against the more sombre prestige slate covered in our recent round-up of British work at Cannes, it feels almost ostentatiously light.
Our Criminal Record season 2 review covers the heavier end of that slate, with Peter Capaldi and Cush Jumbo going round two on Apple TV+.
Of the six episodes, two are quietly exceptional (the second and the fifth), three are strong and one – the third – drags. That is a better ratio than most British comedies released in the last twelve months. Walker is in career-best form. Clement is the rare American transplant who has actually figured out the English register. Sophie Goo
Disney+ has leaned hard into prestige drama this year; our Testaments review judges whether the Gilead sequel justifies the hype.
Jermaine is a New Zealander. He and Nicola only met making this show.