Get ready for the basic brunch revival of The ‘Burbs
Peacock's "Only Murders In The Cul-de-sac."
If you were to clock the YPM, or “yuks-per-minute,” in Celeste Hughey’s reimagining of Joe Dante’s 1989 suburban horror-comedy The ‘Burbs, you’d land at roughly three jokes per minute. On paper, that makes the show a success. In execution? I’m a tough laugh, so I tried not to dwell too much on the series’s withering, ceaselessly chatty, deeply affected sense of humor. Instead, I tried to invest in the mystery it set before me. How’d that go? I’ll pull a page out of The ‘Burbs 2026’s book and stash that for later on.
But if you’re in a rush and need a takeaway on the show, which drops all eight episodes on Peacock this Sunday, I’ll make it quick: for folks who unironically use “life, laugh, love” as their mantra, who take their black comedy with heaping spoonfulls of sugar, and who enjoy a glass of chardonnay or three with TV night — no judgment — The ‘Burbs should prove diverting enough. Those hoping for a dementedly good time as Keke Palmer (chipper, terrific, absolutely boosting the material) navigates a conspiracy in her suburban cul-de-sac with the same soft-as-cashmere energy as Hulu’s Only Murders in the Building, I’d suggest tempering expectations. The ‘Burbs presents as a murder mystery-comedy but lacks the feisty, darkly ironic, EC Comics energy Dante brought to his film, often playing like a young Millennial riff on Scooby-Doo that’s less interested in exhuming a fresh take on its Tales From the Crypt elements than idling comfortably within its comic inoffensiveness.
A darkness descends over the sangria parties and wine nights of Ashford Place with the arrival of Gary (Justin Kirk), a grim fellow who buys the block’s creepiest old house and spends his days filling it with axes and bags of lime. Naturally, he doesn’t make a great first impression with Samira (Palmer), who brings him baked goodies as his fellow new neighbor and has the cops called on her for her trouble. “People are [racist] assholes everywhere,” she’s told by her exhaustingly agreeable hubby Rob (Jack Whitehall, a stale piece of toast if there ever was one). True enough; racism, even the casual, sinister brand that hangs in the air of this neighborhood, is often countered with an even hand. Samira is generally more forgiving than assertive when it rears its head—a strange fit for her litigator character and for Palmer herself, though she inflects these moments with a curious glimmer of mirth, like she’s enjoying some private joke.
Only a small handful of characters can match Palmer’s energy, and when they share the screen, The ‘Burbs succeeds in its warm comic ambitions. Thanks to the support of her new neighbors — widowed Lynn (Julia Duffy), retired soldier Dana (Paula Pell, blurring the film’s Bruce Dern and Rick Ducommun roles), and the android-like Tod (Mark Proksch) — Samira finds a safe space to unwind and later commiserate on Gary’s seemingly nefarious doings. Peripherally, other neighbors, like Agnes, their domineering HOA honcho (Danielle Kennedy), drop microaggressions and jokes about Samira’s mixed-race baby. These moments make light commentary on the Black experience in white suburbia, but add little thematic heft to the mystery — at least until the season already has one foot out the door.
Despite the light social static, Samira eventually settles into her new life as a mom and wife. The days are long, though, and she keeps catching Gary doing shady shit from her windows. What’s he up to in that house that sticks out from the cul-de-sac like a zit at prom night? There’s a lot of chardonnay to drink before that reveal, though the agonizing wait contributes one unintentionally funny line from Samira in episode six: “I feel like we’re getting somewhere!”
Along with the extra space largely occupied by sweetly rendered character beats, The ‘Burbs also keeps busy with its multiple plot threads. The most pertinent is a missing figure from Rob’s past, a girl named Alison who once lived in the house Gary now occupies. As the season progresses and Samira and her nosy coterie dig up dirt on both Alison, Gary, and (oops) themselves, more secrets squirm to the surface. Why does Dana’s knee keep acting up at inconvenient moments? Why is Rob in possession of a keepsake that belonged to Alison? Where did Agnes’s dog dig up that huge bone — or, rather, to whom did it once belong? (Less fascinating is the emerging arc of Rob’s childhood friend Naveen, played by Kapil Talwalkar, who begins the series in divorced-guy mode and self-actualizes alongside the mystery’s big reveals. While Talwalkar is fine in the role, his character’s contributions grate something awful.)
Formally, the series’s aesthetic is competent and lacks expression: a dolly zoom here, some shadow play in Gary’s unpleasant basement there, all of it reaching for the cracked Americana of Bryan Fuller’s Pushing Daisies but can only muster a fraction of its visual playfulness. When it bothers with a creative flourish, its underwhelming results denote the series’s lack of genre curiosity. The ‘Burbs is missing the mischievousness Dante brought to his film, and with it, that film’s indelible knack for letting us feel like we were in on a really good joke. (Dante was not included in the production; credit goes to the film’s screenwriter, Dana Olsen.)
What all this amounts to is the basic brunch revival of The ‘Burbs, a pleasant, protracted, faintly anesthetizing time-sink that I’m sure Peacock hopes will keep folks tethered to its streaming app. It’s just the latest in an odious trend we’re seeing in streaming: the TV show based on a movie, not an expansion or legacy sequel or even a prequel (like Ted, another Seth MacFarlane production), but a “reimagining” that stretches a movie people like to the length of a good night’s sleep. Still on the way is Apple TV’s Cape Fear series with Javier Bardem and Amy Adams, and A24 is currently prepping a Texas Chainsaw Massacre series for some damn reason. To Hughey’s credit, the expanse of this adaptation gives her plenty of space to play with suburban tropes just as Dante did thirty-seven years ago, from the neighbor who lets their dog poop on other folks’ lawns to utopian picket fences and immaculate front yards. Only here, it all serves to idealize suburbia, not deconstruct or even lampoon it; that’s for future seasons. Why so sluggish to disrupt the status quo, The ‘Burbs? Must be all that wine.
BEST LINE(s):
“Don’t you dare touch that woman’s pie!” - Agnes, to her poor husband.
“Yeah, there are things that keep me up at night… the odd sound… th-the dark.” - Tod.
BEST MOMENT: Going to have to call it a wash. I enjoyed the wine nights between Samira, Lynn, Dana, and Tod — they share lively banter, truly — but there was never a moment that popped for me during these eight episodes, nothing to take with me once it ended.
SERIES’ MVP: Tod Mann. Strange, almost alien, seemingly asexual yet not without warmth and affection for his friends, Mark Proksch was a much-welcome source of the peculiar energy that The ‘Burbs otherwise lacked.
PICKET FENCES:
I won’t spoil whether or not any surviving cast members from ‘89 Burbs show up, though I will say that if they do, you may wish they hadn’t.
If you need another example of how The ‘Burbs stretches over five hours of TV, let me direct you to episode three, “Sardines.” An excruciating amount of the episode is spent with Samira and her fellow neighbors making small talk with a spoilery character in the hopes of pulling information about the mysterious house and its shady new owner. Its b-plot is spent with Rob and Naveen sipping craft brews at the town’s sensibly refurbished watering hole. Gripping, new-Burbs is not.
Another thing from that episode: Sardines on pretzels actually sound amazing. Why is this show trying to tell me sardines are gross?
“Who wants to be Watson?” - Naveen, who’s clearly never read the Sherlock Holmes stories.
5 / 10
The ‘Burbs premieres with all eight episodes on Peacock Sunday, February 8.