The Hollywood Reporter (Weekly)
Alice & Jack
PBS’ six-part relationship drama stars Andrea Riseborough and Domhnall Gleeson as angsty on-again/off-again lovers, but it’s the viewers who really suffer
The first seconds of PBS’ Alice & Jack set the tone for what’s to come. “Love is the best thing we have,” Jack (Domhnall Gleeson) muses in voiceover. “Maybe after we strip away all the bullshit, it’s the only thing we have.”
PG-13 language notwithstanding, it sounds at first like a statement basic enough to embroider on a pillow to sell alongside live-laugh-love signs at Target. In retrospect, however, it reveals itself as a warning. Love, and more specifically the on-off situationship at this drama’s heart, is the only thing the show cares about. But like anything else, love needs outside nourishment to flourish. In focusing so intently on its romance, Alice & Jack starves itself of the authenticity it needs to truly bloom.
The show begins with an evening that both Jack and Alice (Andrea Riseborough) apparently experience as so singular it reorients the very gravity of their lives. After swiping right on a dating app (in 2007, five years before Tinder was invented, but never mind), the future soulmates meet at a bar. She’s flirtatiously prickly, needling him about the “reward calculus” of his unglamorous job in medical research. He’s taken aback but mostly charmed.
One scrupulously chaste sexual encounter later — the camera cuts from the pair kissing in her living room to him waking up shirtless in her bed — she’s all but shoving him out the door. She insists she does not want to see him again. He texts her anyway. She’s delighted to hear from him but ghosts him regardless.
Thus begins a push-pull dynamic that will overcome what Alice describes as a “Kremlinsized collection of red flags” to define the next decade and a half of their lives as captured by creator Victor Levin (Mad About You) in six hourlong chapters. Riseborough and Gleeson make out about as well as could be expected from two characters we’re barely given a chance to know before they’re thrust into delirious angst. Riseborough complicates Alice’s jaded smirk with eyes that seem perpetually on the verge of flooding with tears. Gleeson leans in where she leans away, is guileless where she’s guarded. Their chemistry is solid, if not nearly intense enough to justify an opening chapter so mopey I halfexpected to learn Gleeson was once again playing a Black Mirror bereavement robot.
But it’s difficult to picture any two performers making much of such shallow material. From the moment they meet, Alice and Jack are consumed by their hot-and-cold dynamic, and Alice & Jack is too. To its credit, the series acknowledges how damaging this can be. Contrary to everyone’s favorite wedding scripture, love is certainly not always patient and kind. It can compel people to act selfishly, as Jack does when he lies to his eventual wife, Lynn (Aisling Bea), about his true feelings. It can make them demand the objectively unreasonable, as Alice does when she asks Jack to walk her down the aisle at her wedding to another man. It can turn us against our best instincts, as when Jack reluctantly agrees.
But the series lacks the perspective to consider anything outside this black hole of anguish. Alice has exactly one friend, an assistant (Aimee Lou Wood) who devotes her entire life to managing Alice’s personal affairs. Jack has exactly one friend, a co-worker (Sunil Patel) who exists solely to groan about Jack crawling back to Alice yet again. (He’s the most relatable human in this thing.) Jack’s daughter, Celia (Millie Ashford), has to seek out Alice before she can decide if her father is worth loving. Though the narrative spans multiple decades, we’re offered no sense at all of the world or people changing around our heroes.
For that matter, we get scant idea of who our heroes are, period. Hulu’s Normal People and Netflix’s One Day get their glow from characters who seem like real people, with preoccupations or desires that might inform the central relationship but exist independently of them. Alice & Jack is only interested in Alice and Jack as a couple.
Indeed, as the years pass, we hear next to nothing about who they were before they met or what they do when they’re apart.
Alice grows less brittle as she ages, but how and why, we’re left to wonder. Jack becomes a minor celebrity in his field, but how that impacts his self-perception or life goals is left unexplored. They might as well be two paper dolls being glued together for all the weight and depth their inner lives get.
Alice & Jack embeds its defense of its failings right in its dialogue. Coming out of a movie, Lynn remarks that it “make[s] emotional, rather than logical sense,” and Jack remarks that all the best things do.
But feelings have their own logic, rooted in the histories or psychologies or circumstances of those experiencing them. Alice & Jack shoots for the vertigo of a star-crossed romance but does too little work to convince us of the relationship’s validity.
“It’s exhausting, isn’t it? Being in love?”
Alice and Jack sigh late in the series, giddy at the spectacle of their own suffering. It’s hard to disagree that their relationship has been tiring. But I don’t think love has anything to do with it.
AIRDATE 10 p.m. Sunday, March 17 (PBS)
CAST Andrea Riseborough, Domhnall Gleeson, Aisling Bea, Sunil Patel, Aimee Lou Wood
CREATOR Victor Levin