Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Alice & Jack’ On PBS, Where A Dysfunctional Romantic Relationship Plays Out Over 15 Years

It’s almost refreshing when PBS’s Masterpiece gives us a show that takes place in the modern day (or at least very close to it) instead of something from a time that requires bodices and knickers. In fact, its latest series touts itself as a “modern romance”, which generally means that the two people in that romance are going to keep missing each other until they finally connect.

ALICE & JACK: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: Kites are flying in the sky. “Love is the best thing we have,” a man says to a woman while they sit in some tall grass. “Maybe, after we strip away the bullshit, it’s the only thing we have.” He kisses her on the shoulder. She gets up and walks back towards the road, smiling back at him. He doesn’t look as happy about that.

The Gist: “2 YEARS AGO.” Jack (Domhnall Gleeson) meets Alice (Andrea Riseborough) in a London bar. They met via online dating, and this seems to be Jack’s first time doing this. Alice is a pretty straightforward and blunt person; she immediately starts asking him about what he does for a living, and when he says he’s researching a cure for Hashimoto’s disease, she starts going down the rabbit hole of why he chose that condition, why he’s doing the research, and what he thinks he’ll get out of it. Jack seems to be disarmed, surprised, and charmed by Alice all at once.

She proposes that they either go back to her place, “or we’ll part as friendly acquaintances. Either’s fine by me.” Of course, he agrees to go back to Alice’s sprawling penthouse (she’s in finance). They sleep together, but it’s definitely as much a romantic connection as it is a sexual one. Still, she politely but firmly tells him to leave as dawn breaks; he wants to call her again but, again, she politely and firmly turns him down.

He is tempted to text, as he tells his friend and coworker Paul (Sunil Patel). “There was something in the subtext,” he says. Alice looks like she wants him to text; she gets one from him saying, “I’m texting based on subtext,” then deletes the conversation. That night, Jack sees Alice at the same bar with another guy, and figures that’s that.

Three months go by; Jack makes a breakthrough at work, and the first person he thinks to call is Alice. They get together again, go to her place — she shaves off the beard he’s grown — and Alice, acknowledging that she’s been thinking about Jack, thinks they should actually spend the next day together. But she panics when he’s not there the next morning, though he’s only gone out for coffee and croissants. And then, at the museum, she gets huffy over something small; when Jack tells Alice to act like a grown up, she says, “this was a mistake” and leaves. That night he gets a text from her saying “I think the world of you,” but to “let it be.”

A year and a half later, it seems that Jack has moved on; he met and married Lynn (Aisling Bea), somewhat impulsively. When she got pregnant during their early dating days, she didn’t want to have a baby outside of marriage, so he proposed. They now have a baby daughter named Celia. When Jack’s phone rings and Lynn sees the name “Alice,” all Jack will say is that she’s an ex. Little does Lynn know that Alice blew a hole in his heart eighteen months prior.

After her phone call was ignored, Alice actually goes to visit Jack at his workplace; he shows her his ring to indicate he’s married. That’s when he explains how, after being brokenhearted for months, he met Lynn. The two of them part on good terms, but it seems like neither of them get any closure.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? The dialogue in Alice & Jack, has a zingy feel like a slowed-down episode of Gilmore Girls. That makes sense when you look up the IMDb of the series’ creator, Victor Levin; he’s a veteran of sitcoms like Mad About You and the currently-running Extended Family, as well as quippy-dialogue-heavy dramas like Mad Men and Devious Maids. Plot-wise, it feels like the second season of Love Life, the season that starred William Jackson Harper and Jessica Williams.

Our Take: One of the subtleties about Alice & Jack is that you have to concentrate to realize that the first episode of the series is a period piece. The two of them aren’t meeting now; a look at the Blackberry Jack uses and the tiny iPhone with the iOS-single-digits interface Alice uses tells us that this is taking place about fifteen or so years ago. So what Levin is setting up is a slow-burn of a love story between two very dysfunctional people who can’t seem to connect simply because they’re too much in their own heads.

Alice seems to be more in her own head than Jack is; we’re not sure if she’s on the spectrum or she’s just being portrayed as having a very blunt personality, but what we see is someone who has a hard time connecting with people, and when she does, she has a hard time accepting that she’s made the connection. She pretty much strings Jack along in those first few months, but not maliciously.

Jack, for his part, just feels like he makes things too complicated for himself. He sees Paul and a woman they meet named Donna (Rachel Adedeji) falling for each other without much in the way of drama, and he felt he was ready to do that himself — a realization that we all manage to come to at some point in our lives. He’s more of an overthinker than anything. But, even though he and Lynn seem to be on their way to domestic bliss, he just can’t shake Alice.

At the end of the first episode, we were wondering if Jack was going to chuck everything with Lynn to be with Alice, despite the fact that Lynn seems like a smart, beautiful, and emotionally together person and Alice’s emotions are all over the place. But after a rewatch, we’ve decided otherwise. However, the end of the episode leaves an opening — Alice’s mother has died, and she thought she would be able to face her father if Jack was by her side — which tells us that Jack may blow up his marriage and family life eventually.

The whole idea that these two are so affected by each other, despite their relatively brief time together, sometimes feel utterly daft and at other times completely plausible. We’ve all met people who have left an immediate impression on us, to the point that we want to get to know them better. But have we thrown away happiness because of it? No, that’s just not real life. Maybe at some point in this series, we’ll get some context about Alice and Jack to help us figure out just who they are and why they seem to be so drawn to each other. But for right now, we’ll have to rely on the copious chemistry between Gleeson and Riseborough to carry us.

Sex and Skin: None. We see Alice and Jack kissing, then see them postcoital, but nothing in between.

Parting Shot: Alice tells Jack about her mother’s death and the thought that she wouldn’t want to face her father without him, but accepts that she must, tells Jack, “I’m happy for you,” gets in a taxi and leaves. Jack looks at the taxi pulling away with the look of someone who just got blindsided.

Sleeper Star: Sunil Patel is very funny as the logical Paul, who tries to be Jack’s voice of reason, but never really seems to get through to him.

Most Pilot-y Line: Jack tells Alice when they first meet that he’s never used a dating app before. But if this is 2008 or ’09, is he really using an app or just a website?

Our Call: STREAM IT. Alice & Jack sometimes feels like one of the most interesting love stories we’ve seen in ages, and at others it’s infuriatingly annoying. But Gleeson and Riseborough have undeniable chemistry, which is enough for us to want to see this decade-and-a-half romance play out.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.