Rent Alice and Jack (2024)

Madly madly madly - Alice and Jack review by DM

The world's biggest sap falls for a manipulative dysthymic psycho. The first three episodes are compelling as he keeps wrecking his life at her whimsical beck and call. She knows exactly how to press his buttons and he burns through his marriage and other relationships with the obsessive ruthlessness only possible to a weak personality. You keep thinking this has to blow up, but when and how? The best thing in it is the sappy guy's best friend (played by Sunil Patel) who keeps trying to warn him to no avail. In the meantime, over the course of years we see the emotional fallout to other people who come into the dysfunctional pair's highly elliptical orbit.

Then in the last three episodes it all switches tone. Suddenly it seems we're supposed to be rooting for these two as star-crossed lovers, even though the only thing that has kept them apart is her arbitrary behaviour and abrupt absences. They start talking about fate and a vague sense of being 'meant to be' (the sweaty desperation of a writer with no plot cards left there) and then the inevitable shadow of terminal illness looms. Who will die? Who cares?