These Are the Most Annoying People to Ever Fall in Love

Alice & Jack boasts the Masterpiece brand, two charismatic and engaging leads, and an initially intriguing story about the intricacies, complications, and madness of love. None of those, however, can outweigh the grating manipulations and frequent inanity of Victor Levin’s six-part PBS drama, premiering Mar. 17, which asks the excellent Andrea Riseborough and Domhnall Gleeson to sell a variety of plot points that strain credibility to preposterous lengths. Despite a few genuinely touching moments, it’s far too daft to enchant.

In London some years ago, Jack (Gleeson) and Alice (Riseborough) meet for a first date facilitated by a matchmaking app. Jack is a reserved and sincere biomedical researcher determined to save the world one cured disease at a time, whereas Alice is a forward, shoot-from-the-hip financial wizard who wastes little energy on things (and people) she doesn’t want. No sooner have they met than Alice decides that she definitely wants Jack, inviting him to either depart as friends or come back to her apartment. Given how taken he is with her, Jack naturally opts for the second option. Post-sex, Alice says that he’s wonderful and then kicks him out, telling him not to call or text. The look in her eye—equal parts smitten and sad—indicates that she’s immediately fallen hard for him, as he has for her, and yet when he does reach out the following day, she ignores him. When Jack sees her that night with another man, he takes it on the chin and tries to move on with his life.

This is the recurring structure of Alice & Jack, with the two repeatedly coming back together because they’re wildly in love with each other, and then separating because, well, creator/writer Levin likes the idea of pushing and pulling his protagonists in an overly melodramatic manner. Alice will eventually be revealed to have lingering daddy issues and Jack will be presented as a sad-sack romantic, but the frequency with which these people stymie their own happiness is so extreme that it resonates not as a symptom of their short-sighted self-destructiveness but of endless screenwriting contrivances. Those begin in earnest once they hook up again three months later and, after Alice allows him to stay the night, they visit a museum and have a petty tiff that hurtles them apart for a year and a half—the first of numerous silly developments that ring false considering their apparently deep connection and affection.

Read more at The Daily Beast.