Review: In the marvelous 'Alice and Steve,' a May-December romance pushes friends apart

“Alice and Steve,” a marvelous six-part British comedy coming Monday to Hulu, gives us Nicola Walker and Jemaine Clement as the titular longtime best friends whose lives are turned inside out when Steve begins dating Alice’s daughter, Izzy (Yali Topol Margalith).She’s 26, and he’s “a 50-year-old man, and that’s when I’m rounding down.”Creator Sophie Goodhart (“Sex Education”) builds her story on themes of youth and age, love and friendship.

Steve is a celebrity stylist — don’t call him a hairdresser — who created the “Nicole Richie bob.” Alice (Walker, known here for “Spooks”), is a clothing designer, married to Daniel (Joel Fry), a music teacher.Their son, Dom (Tyrese Eaton-Dyce), is taken with Rome (Eilidh Fisher), whom he’ll scare off with a premature declaration of love — not that that’s the end of that.

Daniel has a flirty colleague, Marni (Lydia Wilson), who would like him to let his hair down.In the aftermath of a funeral, Alice and Steve go to a club filled with young people and attempt to party like it’s 1995, or whatever year they met at the Hacienda (a famous Manchester venue) with Steve’s beloved French bulldog (I think) and a 20-year-old bag of cocaine in tow.Alice will encourage Steve, who is divorced and lonely, to try his luck with the room’s young women, which will not go well, and at the end of their long night, and an emergency trip to the vet, Izzy, who has come home having just broken up with her boyfriend, finds Steve sleeping on her mother’s couch.

They talk.“I hadn’t noticed before, but you are weirdly hot,” she says.

One thing leads to another.For purposes of the story and for the benefit of the viewer who might otherwise feel a little, you know, dirty, it’s Izzy who drives this scene.(In late-period Cary Grant movies, when he was paired with much younger women, he was never the aggressor, and those films live on.) But Steve is enough of a child, and Izzy enough of an adult, as s...