Crime
The Capture
‘The Capture’ makes for taut, compelling, ethically ambidextrous viewing, and it contains some problematic content as well.
Alice and Steve are best friends.
The pair have known each other for 30 years, ever since they dated as young twentysomethings. But they’ve moved on from each other.
Alice started dating other guys. One of those guys even got her pregnant, and she gave birth to her daughter, Izzy. Then sometime after that, she met Daniel. They got married and had a son, Dom.
Meanwhile, Steve made a name for himself in the competitive and lucrative world of celebrity hair styling. He married a woman named Nancy. They got a dog and called him Crosby. Then he and Nancy divorced, and Steve got to keep Crosby.
But in all that time, Alice and Steve never stopped being friends. They’ve kept each other’s secrets. Cried on each other’s shoulders. Shared each other’s drugs.
It’s after one such drug-addled sharing that Steve crashes on Alice’s couch. Izzy, who’s 26 now, is home from school following a bad breakup with her boyfriend. And somehow or another, Steve winds up sleeping with her.
Alice is upset. How could her best friend, who is old enough to be Izzy’s father, sleep with her daughter? How could her daughter have sex with a man whom Alice herself once had sex with?
It’s a weird, dramatic dynamic, to be sure. It puts a strain on everyone involved. And don’t be fooled: Before this is all over, people are going to get hurt. A lot.
If I were to summarize Hulu’s Alice and Steve in one sentence, it’d be this: It’s about two very selfish and immature people who, in their efforts to make each other miserable, cause misery to everyone they care about.
Thematically, the show has several obvious issues. Alice has no problem with Izzy or Steve having casual sex—just not with each other. And when Izzy and Steve express a desire to have a more meaningful relationship, Alice just loses it. It’s hard to say if she’s more upset that her friend is sleeping with her much-younger daughter or that her daughter is essentially taking away her best friend. She lets it destroy her friendship with Steve, her close bond with Izzy and even her relationship with her husband. She ruins both her and Steve’s careers. And when all the drama starts to affect her son, Dom, she remains completely oblivious.
Granted, the relationship between Izzy and Steve feels very inappropriate. Daniel, the only father that Izzy has ever known, is deeply uncomfortable with Steve’s new role in their family. However, he’s unable to properly address those feelings because of how far Alice has gone off the rails. Instead of being able to support and guide Izzy, he’s left fighting for his own marriage.
Content-wise, viewers must also deal with heavy drug use (including by minors), lots of foul language and an unplanned pregnancy—wherein the young mother is strongly cautioned against keeping her baby by her own mom. There are a couple of LGBT characters, and the show also covers the topic of infidelity.
One thing to be thankful for: While there’s plenty of sex going on behind closed doors, it is just that: behind closed doors. We do see some characters trotting around in their underwear or kissing passionately as a prelude to sex, but there’s no nudity.
I think the creators want us to like the two main characters, but it’s sort of difficult when you watch them make one completely irrational choice after another. Steve, sleeping with the daughter of a woman he once dated (Alice draws attention to the fact that Steve could, technically, be Izzy’s father), feels icky. Alice tells her husband at one point that even though she loves him, she loves herself more—and she thinks he’s a fool for loving her as much as he does.
But all in all, Alice and Steve (the characters and the show) feels unhinged.
(Editor’s Note: Plugged In is rarely able to watch every episode of a given series for review. As such, there’s always a chance that you might see a problem that we didn’t. If you notice content that you feel should be included in our review, send us an email at letters@pluggedin.com, or contact us via Facebook or Instagram, and be sure to let us know the episode number, title and season so that we can check it out.)
Alice encourages her lonely best friend, Steve, to date younger women (since Steve wants to have kids and women his own age can’t have them). Steve takes her advice and begins dating Alice’s 26-year-old daughter, Izzy, infuriating Alice.
After a night on the town, Steve crashes on Alice’s couch. When Izzy comes downstairs to get some wine, Steve hides his face under a blanket because he notices that Izzy isn’t wearing trousers. Izzy isn’t shy, sitting on the couch next to Steve. They start talking and, eventually, kissing. The camera cuts away, but we learn the next day that they had sex. And soon thereafter, they begin dating.
A woman crawls on top of her husband while he’s sleeping, suggestively flirting with him. A couple of women wear outfits that show cleavage and tummies. When Alice tries to find a date for Steve, a woman mistakenly believes Alice is flirting with her, and she informs Alice that she is straight. Alice tells Steve that men who carry little dogs like his are frequently perceived as gay.
A woman jokes that, in the event of a flood, she would use her mother’s body as a flotation device to save her best friend. At an open-casket funeral, someone’s dog sneezes on the deceased’s body. Someone jokes about ripping off an ex-boyfriend’s head and then evacuating their bowels into the head.
Alice and Steve use a friend’s funeral as an excuse to get drunk. After doing several shots at a bar, they snort some very old cocaine, wondering how (or if) it will affect them. Steve’s dog, Crosby, winds up eating the leftover cocaine and collapses on the floor, struggling to breathe. They take Crosby to the vet but lie about what the dog ingested. Steve eventually fesses up, stating that he would rather go to jail than watch Crosby die. The vet saves the dog, but she rightly scolds Steve and Alice for allowing the animal to access the drug.
People drink wine throughout the episode. Izzy imbibes heavily after going through a bad breakup.
We hear a handful of uses each of the f-word and s-word. God’s name is misused twice. We also hear “a—hole” and “h—.”
Emily studied film and writing when she was in college. And when she isn’t being way too competitive while playing board games, she enjoys food, sleep, and geeking out with her husband indulging in their “nerdoms,” which is the collective fan cultures of everything they love, such as Star Wars, Star Trek, Stargate and Lord of the Rings.
‘The Capture’ makes for taut, compelling, ethically ambidextrous viewing, and it contains some problematic content as well.
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