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.
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…
