As with the best music, meals, and sex, good movies are always just the right length.
Streaming TV, however, believes that good movies are, in fact, too short—and, whenever possible, should be remade at multiple times their original duration.
They’re die-hard disbelievers in concision, and the latest expression of this conviction is The ‘Burbs, an eight-part reimagining of the 1989 Tom Hanks-headlined, Joe Dante-directed black comedy, which, in every respect, proves the folly of this most tedious of trends.
The ‘Burbs’ big-screen source material may not be a classic, but it’s light years more tolerable than Peacock’s do-over (February 8), whose main idea is to draw out its mystery to an interminable, mirth-murdering degree.
As before, its action is set in a suburban cul-de-sac and revolves around a resident, in this case Keke Palmer’s Samira, who suspects that something strange is afoot at the creepy Victorian mansion on her block. The difference here is that Samira has just moved to the neighborhood—Hinkley Hills, the “safest town in America”—and she has time to theorize about grand malevolent conspiracies because she’s on maternity leave with her baby Miles, whose dad Rob (Jack Whitehall) grew up in their new home and now commutes to the city for work with his childhood best friend Naveen (Kapil Talwalkar), who’s smarting from his two-timing wife’s departure.
Samira initially expresses unease about living in a white-picket-fence community as a Black woman, but she is welcomed with open arms by her neighbors, who quickly invite her to join their daily wine-drinking club. Happy homemaker Lynn (Julia Duffy) is the nominal leader of this pack, which also includes retired Marine Dana (Paula Pell) and weirdo Tod (What We Do in the Shadows’ Mark Proksch). The ‘Burbs puts maximum effort into making them a cute and quirky clique.
The problem, unfortunately, is that Celeste Hughey’s series wouldn’t know a funny one-liner if it walked up and sat in its lap, and the flaccidness of this crew’s banter is so severe that Naveen, positioned (and played) as the kooky wisecracking sidekick, is almost amusing by comparison—emphasis on almost.
Palmer likewise works hard to cast Samira as a strong, feisty woman of action, yet she and Whitehall are such an unbelievable couple—their chemistry is through the basement floor—that the whole thing feels instantly, irrevocably phony. Nonetheless, The ‘Burbs continues to dispense lame quips as it sets up its primary plot.
Samira is unnerved by the Victorian, and she’s just as uncomfortable with its new owner, Gary (Justin Kirk). A cold and shady loner, Gary stares at her from upstairs windows like a wannabe Norman Bates and responds to Samira dropping off housewarming brownies on his stoop—an attempt to get some intel on him—by calling the cops on her for trespassing, thereby giving the series its one real opportunity to gin up some (unconvincing) racial-profiling tensions.
Gary isn’t a racist but, rather, an aloof and rude stranger whom Samira comes to believe might have been involved with the 22-years-earlier disappearance of a local girl named Alison, who was rumored to have been buried in the Victorian’s basement.
The sight of Gary skulking around at night—and a dog running about with a human-sized bone in its mouth—suggests that nefariousness is afoot. Hints that Rob knows more about Alison than he’s letting on only stoke Samira’s suspicions, and The ‘Burbs drags this implication out by having its characters act coyly for pure narrative-extending purposes.
Adding to the mystery, everyone else behaves strangely as well, be it Dana abruptly ditching a nocturnal outing or Lynn, while babysitting, snooping in Samira and Rob’s house.
After she and Rob run into Gary buying ostensible murder tools at the hardware store, Samira becomes convinced that he’s a villain. Her sleuthing is the backbone of The ‘Burbs, even as it fleshes out its action with various threads, such as Lynn’s hostile rapport with Homeowner’s Association bigwig Agnes (Danielle Kennedy) and Naveen’s moping over being left by his two-timing wife.
Hughey’s show plays a familiar game by intimating that virtually all its characters are potentially evil, only to reveal that the secrets they’re hiding are less shocking than pedestrian—or, at least, explicable and unrelated to the goings-on at the Victorian. This is a tired, predictable routine, and the time spent on it is so excessive that the material feels as if it’s moving in slow motion.
The ‘Burbs nods to its ancestor via a few fan service-y cameos, and its story eventually goes in its own unique direction, spinning an expansive yarn about the many missing-people cases that have plagued this seemingly idyllic hamlet. Everything about it, however, is bland and flat, including its performances, with Palmer thoroughly unpersuasive as a nosy suburbanite, Whitehall earnest and unfunny as her spouse, and the rest less wacky than “wacky.”
That the show isn’t as well directed as its Dante-helmed predecessor is no surprise. Still, the proceedings’ lack of formal zip contributes to its lethargy, as do its token references to the difficulties of integration and coming home—issues that are raised and then immediately dropped in order to let everyone get back to dull comic hijinks.
The ‘Burbs repeatedly has Palmer’s Samira update her buddies about her latest activities as a transparent means of providing viewers with recaps of preceding episodes—this despite the fact that actual recaps preface each installment.
As Matt Damon recently explained, this is a device born from streamers’ belief that audiences don’t pay close attention to what they’re watching because they’re busy doing other things (like looking at their phones). In this instance, Hughey and company have good reason to worry about people tuning out.
Glacially paced and devoid of thrilling bombshells or any trace of hilarity, the series is a case study in subtraction by addition, and makes one pine for a version of this tale that does away with its extraneous threads and puts a premium on daffy, well-orchestrated, suburbia-skewering humor—say, one just like the original The ‘Burbs.
