I’m pretty sure nobody asked for a remake, airing on Sky One, of The ’Burbs, one of Tom Hanks’s least likeable films. And I’m absolutely sure no fan of the original said, “Let’s add a race element to this by making the lead character a black woman who suffers various micro-aggressions from her neighbours, but at the same time let’s have her married to Jack Whitehall, doing his posh public school Brit thing in the middle of white picket fence America.” Yet here we are.
Whitehall and Keke Palmer play Rob and Samira Fisher, a married couple who move to Rob’s old family home in the suburbs after having a baby. It’s a neighbourhood of spacious houses, neatly mown lawns and nosy residents, where the main entertainment is “wine nights” on the local busybody’s front porch.
The Fishers’ home stands opposite a spooky Victorian house that has been derelict for 20 years and, according to rumour, was the scene of a terrible crime. One night, a new owner moves in and gets Samira’s spidey-senses tingling. There’s the time he hauls a body-sized bundle into his house, and the time she spots him in the local hardware store buying an axe and some rubber gloves. She and a motley crew of neighbours start to keep tabs on him, believing he might be a murderer in their midst. But as the episodes go on, it also becomes clear that Rob knows more about that house than he’s letting on.
All of this is investigated in the low-stakes style of Only Murders in the Building. Unfortunately, The ’Burbs, produced by Family Guy’s Seth MacFarlane, isn’t half as funny or camp as that show. Nor does it have the thrills and chills of Netflix’s The Watcher, which trod similar ground. What it does have is Whitehall, in quite the worst piece of transatlantic casting since they put Keanu Reeves in Bram Stoker’s Dracula.
There is also a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it Tom Hanks cameo.
Samira’s discomfort at being a black newcomer in a white area is valid: when she drops a box of homemade brownies on a neighbour’s front step they call the police to report a black person on their property, and the list of minor annoyances includes another neighbour who claims she can’t pronounce Samira’s perfectly pronounceable name. She is also a new mother adjusting to the isolation of maternity leave while her husband escapes the claustrophobic cul-de-sac each morning when he heads to work in the city.
All of this is undercut by Whitehall’s delivery of his lines. “Everyone likes Brownies. They’re the Beyoncé of dessert,” and “I’m the guy saved in your phone as ‘White Bob’ with the black thumbs-up emoji,” might have worked with another actor playing the character differently, but here they’re conveyed in exactly the same tone as Whitehall hosting the Brit Awards or making an appearance on the Radio 1 Breakfast Show. There’s a joke that Rob was called “Benedict Cumber-bitch” at school, which could have come straight from one of Whitehall’s stand-up routines.
He is clearly trying to forge a career beyond the comedy world, and his against-type casting in Amazon Prime Video’s Malice was great fun. But American suburbia isn’t the place for him.
The ‘Burbs is on Sky and NOW, and airs on Sky One at 9pm on Wednesday 1 April