The Burbs: Keke Palmer and Jack Whitehall lead sharp remake of 1980s cult classic

Suburbs is such a loaded word.

Ask one person and they’ll say it represents an ideal of blossoming front gardens, neighbours waving hello, and safety. Ask another person and they’ll say suburbia is death.

As we know, both things can be true and not true, and at the same time. What a place of contradictions!

In many American cities, the urban/suburban divide is more wrapped up in social dynamics to do with race and economic power (increased car ownership post-WWII made the “white flight” possible) than it was in Australia, but you get the idea.

The suburbs stand for a mainstream, middle-class, often white, family values-forward utopia, for those who crave such things. But suburbia has been rife for satire for as long as it has been a concept.

From Blue Velvet and The Stepford Wives to Desperate Housewives and Pleasantville, screen culture has long revealed that scratch beneath the surface of any perfectly manicured lawn, and there are dead bodies buried – metaphorical and literal.

The 1989 comedy The ’Burbs featuring a pre-dramatic actor Tom Hanks was an oddball film that played with this idea, especially the people who live there. This TV remake uses it as a springboard to craft a story rooted in a familiar concept but updates it for 2026.

There are two sets of newcomers to Ashfield Place. The first is a young couple and their baby, Samira (Keke Palmer) and Rob (Jack Whitehall), although Rob grew up on the cul-de-sac, so it’s technically a homecoming.

Samira is black and the show isn’t afraid to call out that a new black neighbour in suburbia is sometimes greeted with even more suspicion.

People mispronounce her name, and someone even calls the cops on her, reporting a “black person was seen skulking around the property”, a situation that is only diffused when Rob jumps in and is recognised by the officer.

The second newcomer is Gary (Justin Kirk), taciturn, ashen-faced and a hater of brownies, who buys the abandoned Victorian mansion on the street.

That house has been the subject of local rumours for two decades, when a teenage girl vanished and her parents then soon moved away. When Samira asks Rob about the whispers that the parents had killed and then buried their daughter in the basement, he gets angry.

Rob was living across the street at the time, but he won’t talk about it.

Which only fuels the little group of neighbours Samira falls in with – wine-loving widow Lynn (Julia Duffy), former army vet and lesbian Dana (Paula Pell) and the very strange and surveillance aware Tod (Mark Proksch, aka Colin Robinson the energy vampire from What We Do in the Shadows).

Semi-playing detectives, the four are determined to find out what happens, especially when there so many odd things going on, like shadows appearing in top windows and a very large bone dug up by a neighbour’s dog.

Some things are humorous false alarms and other red flags turn out to be waving furiously, screaming “secrets hiding here!”.

Palmer is a great lead for this show because she has so much charisma and relatability to bring you into this world as someone who has historically not belonged and still now, is made to feel different.

Suburban satires always rely on an element of exaggeration but The ’Burbs gets right that there are great benefits to those types of communities (the tribe Samira finds for herself) but also that for anything that looks perfect on the surface, there’s a lot of ugliness to make it seem that way.

It’s not exactly a ground-breaking take for the genre, but the often spiky The ’Burbs is elevated by its genuinely great cast and their chemistry mix.

The Burbs is streaming on Binge from February 8