We’re a little bit past the very worst of a mostly awful trend, where studio-owned streamers desperately rifle through back catalogues to find much-seen films they can needlessly contort into barely watched TV shows. Paramount did it with Fatal Attraction, American Gigolo and, shudder, Grease: Rise of the Pink Ladies; Warner gave us animated Gremlins and Aquaman shows, and Universal has tried with Pitch Perfect: Bumper in Berlin and a pickup of Lionsgate’s The Continental: From the World of John Wick. It was all boringly inevitable and predictably pointless, but mercifully, that pipeline has now slowed.
Instead, there have been more recent examples of it actually working, film-to-TV extensions with slightly more thought attached. Shows such as The Penguin, Alien: Earth, It: Welcome to Derry, Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, and Ted have found ways to move beyond their source material and focus on the why rather than the just-because. Peacock’s gentle new take on The ’Burbs, a 1989 Tom Hanks comedy horror that slowly found cult classic status, isn’t exactly a necessary next step, but it’s a mostly harmless, decently engaging one that only really reveals its limitations at the very end.
The original, directed by Joe Dante in-between his two Gremlins films, holds a warm place for many who grew up rewatching it on VHS, but it doesn’t quite make the most of its fun Rear Window in the suburbs premise. It gives us an appealing world to spend time in, along with an appealing cast that also includes Carrie Fisher, Bruce Dern and Corey Feldman, but leaves us wanting more from it, not a bad baton for a small screen remake to run with. The Seth MacFarlane-produced remake gives the film an Only Murders in the Building-inspired refresh, replacing the goofier horror elements with a broader, drip-feed mystery. While it retains some of the antic-heavy live-action cartoon feel, that pace is harder to sustain over eight episodes, and would also have been exhausting to watch, and so it settles into a more of-the-moment “cosy mystery” vibe.
Hanks’s staycationing neurotic has turned into Keke Palmer’s lonely new mother Samira, a recent addition to the white picket-fenced, and mostly white, cul-de-sac community where her husband (Jack Whitehall) grew up (“It’s giving Get Out,” she quips). They moved from the danger of the city to the safety of suburbia, but Samira is suspicious of her new surroundings, in particular the spooky run-down house across the way and a slowly revealing backstory that includes the disappearance of a local teen years earlier. She finds her people in a group of similarly curious outcasts (Paula Pell, Julia Duffy and Mark Proksch), and their regular white wine hangs soon turn into strategy meetings.
It’s not as if Only Murders invented, or even did anything that revolutionary with, a certain Sunday afternoon, PG-rated murder mystery subgenre, but its success was such that everyone now wants their own take (if I receive one more book press release with “Only Murders meets ____” … ). That show found its loyal audience not just by tapping into our undying obsession with playing armchair detective but also through high-wattage starpower, the immense charm of Steve Martin and Martin Short powering us through otherwise ho-hum mysteries. Palmer, still riding high after last year’s rare original comedy hit One of Them Days, has some heavy-lifting to do, but it’s a mostly smart use of her considerable charm. She comfortably nails the zippy Scooby Doo silliness without going too big, an actor of many meme-able expressions knowing how and when to deploy them.
But the script can’t always match Palmer or her co-stars, especially Pell, one of our most underrated comedic actors (any one episode of Girls5eva is proof of that), whose delivery and timing demands some far sharper, funnier dialogue (one wonders what a Pell-penned ’Burbs would look like). It’s not hard to enjoy spending time with Palmer, Pell and Duffy and their big glasses of wine, but it would be nice if the writers put as much effort in as their actors. The unfolding plot is just about intriguing enough to keep one clicking for the next episode (without anyone else suggesting a better alternative), but the stretched nature – a 101-minute movie eked out to more than three times that – starts to test our patience by the end. The finale, which clumsily forces a cliffhanger that feels like the result of a panicked compromise, is a real bum note to end on and doesn’t leave us all that curious for the second season, an obvious mystery solved in the most obvious of ways.
If The ’Burbs works initially, it’s because it seems to find a way to fix some of an imperfect film’s shortcomings, but it soon struggles, like so many shows that have come before it, to truly justify its IP resurrection. It falls into a familiar streaming pattern – dragging out, wearing thin, fading from one’s memory fast – giving us yet another not unpleasant but entirely inessential binge-watch.
