Television
Enough With the Great Big Cop-Out Fire
It’s incendiary. It’s all too common. It’s one of the most annoying narrative devices used in TV shows.
June 15, 2026 11:00 AM
Alice and Steve, Ty, and Eleven, enjoying the heat of a narrative cop-out fire.
Photo illustration by Slate. Photos by Tverdohlib/iStock/Getty Images Plus and Hulu, Showtime, and Netflix.
There’s a new TV show out on Hulu and Disney+, by one of the writers of the popular British teen sex comedy Sex Education , called Alice and Steve. It has a tantalizing premise: Alice (Nicola Walker) and Steve (Jemaine Clement) are lifelong best friends in their 50s. Steve is divorced, Alice is married to her second husband, Daniel (Joel Fry), and she has a daughter from a previous relationship called Izzy (Yali Topol Margalith). Izzy is 26. Steve and Izzy start dating, and all hell breaks loose.
In spite of this premise, I can’t say I liked Alice and Steve much. For one thing, the show never convincingly deals with the queasy fact that Steve has known Izzy well since she was a baby. There’s not enough chemistry between the two characters to allow us to forget about that fact, nor does the show seem very interested in wrestling with the inherent creepiness of it. For another, what probably should have been the most interesting and knotty relationship in the show, that between mother-and-daughter duo Alice and Izzy, is never really fleshed out. They profess to be very close at the beginning, but Izzy then sort of stops caring either way about her mother’s pretty understandable unhappiness about her romance with Steve, and Alice goes balls to the wall in trying to destroy her best friend’s life without any sense that she’s thinking much about how her daughter might take that. There are also a handful of underbaked subplots, including Alice and Daniel’s teenage son Dom’s (Tyrese Eaton-Dyce) romance with a nonbinary person called Rome (Eilidh Fisher).
But there’s something else that pushes Alice and Steve from being, to my mind, a mess that I watched in a state of neutral displeasure to a mess that I simply could not forgive: a great big cop-out fire. Without even describing it, you likely know what I’m talking about. Cop-out fires are incendiary incidents that are often used as narrative devices, often in season finales. Television is littered with them: I’m thinking of the cabin fire in Season 2 of Yellowjackets , the mall fire in Season 3 of Stranger Things , the house fire in Season 2 of Desperate Housewives . All of these felt a little easy, because a fire forces a dramatic end to that run of episodes without necessarily earning it. When a scriptwriter doesn’t seem to quite know what to do to resolve their story, there is a temptation to introduce some sort of destructive event that will act as a shortcut to a climax. And most places can be made to catch fire.
In the season finale of Alice and Steve , for example, we’re at a manor house, where—spoilers ahead—Steve and Izzy are having their wedding. Alice and Steve are at war, Izzy and Alice are at war, and remain so as the minutes tick down to the episode’s close. With 10 minutes of runtime left, Dom and Rome are making out in one of the manor’s bedrooms, and they knock a candle over, starting a fire that begins to burn down the whole place. The ensuing threat to all their lives prompts an immediate reconciliation of Alice and her daughter, as well as Alice and Steve, whom she runs into the burning building to rescue, because he has apparently been listening to music on headphones in an upstairs room and therefore didn’t notice the shouting, or the heat, or the smoke filling the house.
I kind of get the allure of throwing a fire into your show. That fires can and do just happen, causing sudden and catastrophic wreckage, is a strange fact of modern life, in its way. It feels almost medieval, that we are all still so vulnerable to an elemental force of this kind. But in the case of Alice and Steve , I found it so, so annoying. It felt like cheating, to have made me sit through three hours of a television show, asked me to try to understand the tensions between all of the various characters and consider how they might be able to find their way forward in their relationships with each other, and then wrapped it all up with a freak accident that wipes away any conflict that remained. Even worse, I could sense that the fire was coming before I even saw the candle in the background of the scene. That’s the mark of some poor storytelling.
Fires don’t always have to be cop-outs, although there is often the smell of convenience mingled in with the ash when a fire starts in a story. Sometimes, a fire can be earned, as better-written shows have demonstrated. As I see it, you can put a catastrophic fire in your TV show if, and only if, certain conditions are met. Let’s call these the ground rules of letting a fire consume your story.
No. 1: The fire starts for reasons that make satisfying dramatic sen…
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