Burbs Review – Keke Palmer Takes Over for Tom Hanks in Foamy TV Remake | American television

WWe’re a little past the worst of the often terrible trend, where studio-owned streamers desperately search through back catalogs to find over-watched movies that they can unnecessarily turn into barely-watched TV shows. Paramount did that with Fatal Attraction, American Gigolo, and Shiver, Grease: Rise of the Pink Ladies; Warner has given us animated spin-offs for Gremlins and Aquaman, Universal has tried its hand at Pitch Perfect: Bumper in Berlin and a mini-vehicle from Lionsgate’s The Continental: From the World of John Wick. It was all boringly inevitable, and predictably pointless, but thankfully that pipeline has now slowed down.

Instead, there have been more recent examples of it actually working, which are film-to-TV extensions with more thought attached. Shows like The Penguin, Alien: Earth, It: Welcome to Derry, Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, and Ted have found ways to transcend their source material and focus on the why rather than just the why. Peacock’s bland remake of The ‘Burbs, Tom Hanks’ 1989 horror-comedy that slowly found classic status, isn’t exactly a necessary next step, but it’s mostly harmless, decently engaging and only reveals its limitations toward the end.

The original film, directed by Joe Dante between his two Gremlins films, holds a warm spot for many who grew up rewatching it on VHS, but it doesn’t make the most of its fun back window into the suburbs premise. It gives us an engaging world to spend time in, along with an engaging cast that also includes Carrie Fisher, Bruce Dern, and Corey Feldman, but it leaves us wanting more of it, not a bad stick for a small-screen remake. The Seth MacFarlane-produced remake gives the film an Only Murders in the Building -inspired update, replacing its darker horror elements with a broader mystery. Although it retains some of the feel of a heavy live-action cartoon, that pace is difficult to maintain over the course of eight episodes, and can even be exhausting to watch, so it settles into a more modern “cozy mystery” vibe.

Hanks’ neurotic outsider is transformed into Keke Palmer’s new single mother, Samira, a recent addition to the gated, mostly white, cul-de-sac community where her husband (Jack Whitehall) grew up (“It gives the exit,” she quips). They have moved from the danger of the city to the safety of the suburbs, but Samira is suspicious of her new surroundings, particularly the creepy dilapidated house across the road and the slowly revealed backstory involving the disappearance of a local teenager years earlier. She finds her people among a group of curious outcasts (Paula Bell, Julia Duffy, and Mark Proksch), and soon the usual white wine sipping turns into strategy meetings.

It’s not as if Only Murders invented, or even did anything revolutionary, the subgenre of PG-rated Sunday afternoon murder mysteries, but its success has been such that everyone now wants their own story (if you get another press release for a book called “Only Murders meets ____”…). This show has found its loyal audience not only by exploiting our lifelong obsession with playing armchair detective, but also through the sheer star power and sheer charm of Steve Martin and Martin Short powering us through the mysteries. Palmer, still riding high after the success of last year’s rare original comedy One of Them Days, has some heavy lifting to do, but it’s mostly a clever use of her considerable charm. She comfortably masters the silliness of Scooby-Doo without getting too big, and she’s an actress with many funny expressions that she knows how and when to use.

But the script can’t always match Palmer or her co-stars, especially Bell, one of our most underrated comedic actors (any single episode of Girls5eva is proof of that), whose delivery and timing require sharper, funnier dialogue (one wonders what a “Burbs” written by Bell would have sounded like). It’s not hard to enjoy spending time with Palmer, Bale, Daffy and large glasses of wine, but it would be nice if the writers put in as much effort as their actors. The plot unfolds only About thrilling enough to keep a flick going for the next episode (without anyone else suggesting a better alternative), but the extended nature — a 101-minute film grosses more than three times that — begins to test our patience by the end. The finale, which clumsily forces us into a cliffhanger that feels like the result of a panicked compromise, is a real note to end on and leaves us all curious for Season 2, an obvious mystery resolved in the most obvious way possible.

If The Burbs succeeds at first, it’s because it seems to find a way to fix some of the shortcomings of an imperfect film, but it soon struggles, like many shows before it, to truly justify reviving the intellectual property. It falls into a familiar broadcast pattern – slowing down, wearing out, fading from one’s memory quickly – giving us another viewing that is not unpleasant but wholly unnecessary.