Keke Palmer’s The ‘Burbs Is a Horror-Comedy Remake With a Surprisingly Sweet Twist
When a new mother moves out of the city to the suburban cul-de-sac where her husband grew up, her first encounters with the neighbors call to mind a contemporary horror-comedy classic. “It’s giving Get Out,” says Samira, played by the effervescent Keke Palmer. A tenacious lawyer on maternity leave, Samira is Black. The man she hastily married, Rob (Jack Whitehall), is a self-deprecating, white, British-born book editor. And the mostly white residents of Hinkley Hills are the kind of people who peer into newborn Miles’ baby carriage and coo: “What a cute little mocha munchkin!” You almost expect them to channel Daniel Kaluuya’s prospective Get Out inlaws and announce that they would’ve voted for Obama a third time if they could have.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]This is the setup for a new Peacock series, streaming in full on Feb. 8, that takes its title, backdrop, and relatively little else from a very different horror comedy: The ‘Burbs. Styled like a B movie but led by A actor Tom Hanks, the 1989 original put a self-consciously silly spin on the Hollywood cliché that picket fences and manicured lawns conceal all manner of private suffering (see: All That Heaven Allows, Revolutionary Road, American Beauty, The Stepford Wives, and many more). The new ‘Burbs, expanded to eight episodes by creator Celeste Hughey, seems at first to be a stale, simplistic fusion of its namesake and the more recent wave of racially attuned social thrillers popularized by Get Out director Jordan Peele. (Palmer also starred in Peele’s latest movie, 2022’s Nope.) But the show finds a unique voice fast, revealing a sense of humor that is gentler than that of its influences and unusually nuanced in its take on suburban secrets.
My initial impression of the show wasn’t much more favorable than Samira’s was of her new neighborhood. A premiere scripted by Hughey (a veteran of Palm Royale, Dead to Me, and other series that boldly mix genres and tones) largely obscures the personalities of the central couple in a cloud of exposition. “We went from city loft to lawn so fast,” Samira marvels, strolling down their picturesque residential street in her Howard sweatshirt. “We did everything so fast,” Rob replies, taking one hand off Miles’ stroller to sling a protective arm around his bride. “Hinkley Hills is a safe place to grow up.” Living in the house his parents left behind to travel the world on a perpetual cruise for retirees was neither partner’s dream. But their love is real—or so their rom-commy flirting suggests—and they want the best for their baby. So, suburbia it is.
Samira’s creepiness detector starts pinging the moment she lays eyes on the house across the street. It’s a sprawling, decrepit Victorian that looks like it was dropped among the midcentury mini-mansions by the Munsters (or some overzealous CGI practitioner. Very rarely do we see its exterior in the same frame as the houses around it). The place has sat empty for years. As the perpetually curious Samira discovers, a girl who lived there, Alison Grant, went missing when she and Rob were teenagers. She was never found. And Rob doesn’t seem to want to talk about his old neighbor. “What is there to tell?” he asks his childhood friend, Naveen (Kapil Talwalkar), as they commute. There is, of course, plenty. It just takes a while to come out.
But first, in a series of events that happens at the only-on-TV speed of essentially overnight, the Victorian goes up for sale. It is instantly sold. A crotchety man played by jerk specialist Justin Kirk (you may remember him as Succession’s trollish far-right presidential candidate, Jeryd Mencken) moves in. And when Samira tries to make nice by dropping off brownies at his doorstop, he reports to the cops that a Black person was skulking around his property. Taken together with too many try-hard jokes (Rob: “Everyone likes brownies. Brownies are the Beyoncé of dessert”), this storyline suggests we’re in for something like a clumsy, incongruously comic retread of Amazon’s controversial redlining horror series Them: Covenant.
Thankfully, The ‘Burbs pivots. I’m not talking about a plot twist, though there are plenty of those. What I mean is that, instead of putting Samira through a nightmare gauntlet of genteel racism, the show quickly gets her out of the police crosshairs, dials back the forced one-liners, and shifts its emphasis to dark character comedy. Instead of forcing her to fight hostile bigots, it surrounds her with flawed but fundamentally well-meaning people. A motherly widow, Julia Duffy’s Lynn, invites Samira to “Wine Night” on her front porch, a de facto support group for lonely neighbors. There, she meets a gruff but kind lesbian ex-Marine, Dana (Girls5eva’s Paula Pell), and taciturn oddball Tod (Mark Prosch, a.k.a. What We Do in the Shadows’ “energy vampire”). That Pell and Prosch play characters extremely similar to the ones for which they’re best known only makes their eccentricity feel more lived-in. Tod didn’t even have to speak to make me laugh; watching him pedal around on a ridiculous recumbent bike did the trick.
As in suburban exposés past—and many contemporary domestic thrillers—all of these people have secrets, including the spouse with whom Samira is still in honeymoon mode. What’s hidden trickles out slowly, and is almost always sadder than it is sinister. In the meantime, viewers are on a journey with Samira, a vital role in which the magnificently energetic Palmer (an executive producer) is ideally cast, as this outsider comes to adore the weirdos bored enough to play detective with her. The Alison Grant mystery isn’t quite a red herring. It gives structure to the season. But its purpose isn’t, in the end, to wallop us with the old, profoundly unshocking revelation that the ‘burbs are evil. It’s to bring together neighbors who might otherwise have kept a suspicious distance from one another. All it takes to start building a community, this quietly hopeful show suggests, is the courage to give the people around you a chance.