Have you had your heart broken by Normal People and One Day? Looking to repeat the experience with another years-long love story? Alice & Jack might be the show you’re looking for.
Created by Victor Levin (Mad Men, Mad About You) and starring Andrea Riseborough and Domhnall Gleeson, Alice & Jack charts the on-again, off-again relationship between its titular couple over the course of 15 years, showcasing love in all its messy, unexpected, and even funny moments. As Gleeson put it during the Television Critics Association (TCA) winter press tour, “Being in love is the least mundane thing — it’s the most exciting thing that can happen to you.”
What’s Alice & Jack about?
Finance executive Alice (Riseborough) and scientist Jack (Gleeson) share a deeply powerful connection right from their very first meeting. Soon, though, a deep trauma from Alice’s past leads her to reject Jack, and the two part ways.
But that parting is far from the end of their connection. Over the next 15 years, Alice and Jack cross paths again and again, with circumstances and personal imperfections always getting in the way of their love. Will they ever be able to fully realize their relationship? Or are they doomed to be kept apart?
“The world is dearly and desperately in need of stories about love in all its form right now,” Levin said when Mashable asked about the show’s story similarities with Normal People and One Day. “I think the more that we can put out things that carry some form of that message, the better.”
“[This is] a love between two people who make a lot of mess, and one of them who’s gone through a lot of mess,” Riseborough explained. “These people still deserve to live out love, whether it looks conventional or not.”
Andrea Riseborough and Domhnall Gleeson were the only choices for the characters of Jack and Alice.
Levin revealed at TCA that while he was writing Alice & Jack, he could only picture Riseborough and Gleeson as the title characters. “Out of nine billion people, they’re the two best people for the roles,” Levin said.
Riseborough and Gleeson have known each other for 15 years, which just happens to be the same amount of time we follow Alice and Jack’s relationship. According to Riseborough, this coincidence also helped inform their performances throughout Alice & Jack‘s long timeline. Joining the pair in Alice & Jack are Aimee Lou Wood (Sex Education), Aisling Bea (This Way Up), and Sunil Patel (Love at First Sight).
Alice & Jack premieres on PBS at 10 p.m. ET on March 17.
