SNAPSHOT
Alice & Jack reveals how love plays out between two very different people over 15 years. The story explores the seminal question of whether the bonds between us are stronger than the forces that would tear us apart. “It’s more honest about human behavior than most romances allow,” says RogerEbert.com, and “[asks] audiences to think about subjects they think they know well and look at them from a different angle.”The miniseries is created by Mad Men award-winning writer Victor Levin (Mad Men, Mad About You) and features moving performances from Oscar®-nominated Andrea Riseborough (To Leslie, Birdman) as Alice, a single woman invested in her career while grappling with a childhood trauma, and Domhnall Gleeson (The Revenant, About Time) as the lonely yet charming scientist she meets in a bar. The cast also includes Aisling Bea (This Way Up), Aimee Lou Wood (Sex Education), and Sunil Patel (Love at First Sight). (courtesy official MASTERPIECE site)
We’ve been trained to see love, true love as an endlessly progressive linear journey where two people go from being strangers to intimate love interests, all of which one step towards ever great romance after another.
Rom-coms love the idea, we love the idea and no one really wants to admit that it’s very rarely ever as easy as that.
It’s a brave show or book that admits that the hype and the reality may not exactly smoothly if ever converge, but it looks like Alice & Jack, like One Day or The Elegance of the Hedgehog before it, looks like it’s willing to ‘fess up to the fact that sometimes Cupid takes you down a rocky, poorly-maintained road and not a marble road on the journey to love.
That might not seem as romantic but honestly I think it is; sure, the getting there might be tougher, and sometimes you do miss out on the happily-ever-after but if it does work, then what a treasure you have and how much more you will value it for it being so hard won.
Alice & Jack premieres on MASTERPIECE on PBS on 17 March 2024.