Alice & Jack, review: Channel 4's joyless, anti-Valentine's slog is no One Day
A man and a woman spend the best part of two decades in love but not getting together. That’s the plot of One Day, a lively romance currently breaking hearts on Netflix. Unfortunately, it’s also the plot of Alice & Jack (Channel 4), a joyless slog that is being released on Valentine’s Day in what feels like an arthouse joke.
Andrea Riseborough and Domhnall Gleeson play the leads. She’s a City high-flyer, he’s a shy biomedical researcher. They meet on an internet date, which you will observe and think, “Jack, run for your life.” Alice is scarily intense. Even her lipstick is terrifying. They spend the night together, and he wakes in the morning to find her looming over him with an expression that suggests she’s about to remove his organs with a carving knife.
What follows is six episodes of Alice rejecting Jack, announcing that she’s marrying someone else, disappearing for years at a time, then popping up in his life at inconvenient moments, expecting him to drop everything. It seems that the drama’s creator, Victor Levin, wants us to find her endearing. Perhaps the problem is that he’s American (he was a producer of Mad Men) and doesn’t realise that British viewers will simply think Alice is a narcissistic nutjob.
And Jack is such a sap that mostly he does drop everything when Alice reappears. Pity the other woman in his life, played by Aisling Bea. If the story was reversed and it was a man behaving as Alice does, he’d be called all the names in the Mumsnet dictionary. We get a bit of backstory early on about her having a terrible childhood, but that doesn’t excuse or explain everything.
Things get increasingly random. I won’t give away too many spoilers, but there is a plotline about artificial insemination that involves an etymologist from Watford, and an episode in which Alice bangs on about oil futures and yells: “Sell, sell, sell!” like the Duke brothers in Trading Places.
It manages to be preposterous and deathly at the same time. The dialogue is pretentious. The last five minutes are completely stupid. The only bright spots are the two supporting performances, from Aimee Lou Wood as Maya, Alice’s capable assistant, and Sunil Patel as Paul, Jack’s colleague. Paul is always on hand to offer deadpan assessments of the situation. He calls the relationship “a catastrophe”, which is a) correct, and b) a reminder of Catastrophe, the brilliant Channel 4 show about a couple navigating life’s ups and downs. Watch that instead.
