Burbs

New York — Keke Palmer can make Jack Whitehall blush.

We’re sitting in the green room at the 92nd Street Y on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, just before Palmer is set to host a live edition of her podcast, “Baby, This Is Keke Palmer,” with Whitehall and their other co-stars from the Peacock series “The ‘Burbs,” premiering Sunday.

In the show, Palmer and Whitehall play Samira and Rob, new parents who move back to Rob’s hometown of Hinkley Hills, a beautiful suburb where Samira immediately suspects something is amiss.

Palmer has kicked off her high heels and tucked her feet under her on the couch where she sits next to Whitehall as I ask them about their chemistry read.

“He was making me — not just me, everybody — laugh,” she remembers. “It was like, yeah, I can see how you fall in love with this guy because he’s just so funny and he’s so sweet. It’s so true, Jack. Seriously.”

Whitehall’s face turns red, which I point out. He admits that’s the case through giggles. Palmer interjects, “He knows how I feel. That’s my boo.”

“The ‘Burbs” reimagines the 1989 Joe Dante movie starring Tom Hanks for a modern era. In the original, Hanks’ character is driven to madness, imagining that his neighbors in the creepy house across the street might be murderers.

Jack Whitehall as Rob and Keke Palmer as Samira in “The ‘Burbs,” a series that reimagines Joe Dante’s 1989 film.

(Elizabeth Morris/Peacock)

Developed by Celeste Hughey, this version puts Palmer’s Samira, a lawyer on maternity leave, at the center. Though initially ill at ease among the carefully manicured lawns, she develops a fast friendship with a group of gossipy wine guzzlers on her block (played by Julia Duffy, Paula Pell and Mark Proksch). When a creepy man (Justin Kirk) moves into the dilapidated Victorian mansion across the street, she starts to wonder whether it has something to do with the disappearance of a teenage girl years ago. And then she starts to ponder how Rob might be involved. Is it a case of paranoia thanks to new motherhood? Or is there something really amiss in this paradise?

Initially, Brian Grazer of Imagine Entertainment, which made the original, and Seth MacFarlane’s Fuzzy Door Productions had teamed up to do a new film version of “The ‘Burbs.” During the COVID-19 pandemic, MacFarlane thought that the title might make sense for the “dark, humorous, creepy vibes of our shared fear inside our own communities,” Fuzzy Door president and show executive producer Erica Huggins explains in a phone interview. After it was reconceived as a series, they reached out to Hughey.

“When I thought about it for a modern take, I really wanted to center an outsider,” Hughey says, adding, “I grew up in Boston, a very white suburb, as a mixed kid; I wanted to center it on a Black woman who has a new baby, a new husband, in a new neighborhood kind of unwillingly and seeing it through her eyes.”

Palmer was always who Hughey wanted to play Samira, and Grazer had the same idea.

Keke Palmer says she was attracted to the idea of playing a mom having experienced the realities of being a new mom herself.

(Jason Armond/Los Angeles Times)

“She’s so versatile,” Grazer says, adding she could be “really funny and really pretty and she could be the average person. Like, you could live through her and that’s a big thing. What was so great about Tom Hanks is you could live through him.”

It turns out the timing was perfect. Palmer wasn’t all that familiar with the 1989 version, but she identified with Hughey’s vision, especially given that her son, Leo, was around 1 year old at the time.

“Thinking about playing a mom and now being a mom and also being able to use horror and comedy to play with the realities of what it feels like to be a new mom all felt very exciting to me,” she says.

Once Palmer signed on, Hughey and her team needed to find someone to match her infectious energy. Hughey says she imagined Rob as a “fully supportive partner” whose childhood guilt is putting a wedge in their marriage. She and her collaborators landed on Whitehall, a British stand-up comedian who has had stints in blockbusters like 2021’s “Jungle Cruise.”

Whitehall flew into Atlanta from the U.K. to meet Palmer, who was shooting the upcoming Boots Riley film “I Love Boosters.” He tells me he has had bad experiences coming to the U.S. to read with potential co-stars before, but Palmer immediately put him at ease.

“I think I’m just genuinely curious, trying to get to know him, because at the end of the day we’re going to be together every single day and we’re going to be making out and kissing and hugging,” she says. “We gotta be married. Is this my Desi? Am I his Lucy?”

Jack Whitehall, who is also a parent, says he found elements of the script relatable.

(Jason Armond/Los Angeles Times)

Whitehall also understood the nuances of the part because he had a young child as well. His daughter Elsie is now 2 and a half. (Leo is about to turn 3 when we speak.)

“So many elements of the script were really relatable, with the character of Rob and the slight guilt that he has that he’s going back to work and his wife is feeling trapped and wanting to be a protector and to be helpful, but then also not not quite knowing where his place is and how he can be sort of useful and caring,” Whitehall says.

For Palmer, portraying Samira’s unease wasn’t just about highlighting the disconnect between her and Rob, it was also about portraying the specific fears of living in a postpartum state.

“You’re always kind of having this anxiety,” she says. “And I don’t want to say it’s disproportionate, but to a certain degree it is. You’re constantly filtering out, is this real danger? You are kind of constantly gaslighting yourself.”

Throughout the eight-episode season, which ends on a major cliffhanger, “The ‘Burbs” is always trying to make its audience question what is really going on. That specifically relates to Rob, who is keeping a lot of secrets that may or may not be nefarious. It’s an aspect of the character that attracted Whitehall, though he notes, “I think at one point in this series the finger is pointed at literally every single member of our cast.”

“The ‘Burbs” sets out to subvert expectations, and that also applies to the way it deals with Samira’s race.

“It was really important to me that we didn’t make it a cliché,” says Palmer, who is also an executive producer. “It’s expected that we play up the ‘Get Out’ aspect. So I think it was about not being untrue to that reality and how that plays a role in the story but to talk about the bigger thing where it’s really just about being a fish out of water.”

Samira finds a true community among the other neighborhood oddballs, which is true to Palmer’s experience of growing up in Robbins, Ill., outside of Chicago. Whitehall, meanwhile, says he grew up in the “British equivalent of Hinkley Hills” in a town called Putney, on the outskirts of London.

“It was just full of very proper people, but very judgmental, and there were secrets on the street,” he says. “There was scandal as well.”

During our interview it’s clear that Palmer and Whitehall have an easy rapport. They go on tangents about Palmer introducing Whitehall to the 1997 film “Soul Food,” which Whitehall proceeded to reference on set. Palmer grabs Whitehall in exuberance as they speak. While they have different styles of deliveries, their senses of humor are the same, according to Palmer. And they figured out how to make everything click in the show.

“I think we found our timing together and we let each other have our moments,” Palmer says. “Like very telepathic. Like, ‘Time for the bit.’ We can feel each other’s pacing. I guess we just really work well together.”

Sharing with the 1989 Tom Hanks film a title, a vague premise, a little paranoid spirit and a Universal Studios backlot street, “The ‘Burbs,” premiering Sunday on Peacock, stars Keke Palmer and Jack Whitehall as newlywed new parents who have moved into the house he grew up in — his parents are on “a cruise forever” — in Hinkley Hills, the self-proclaimed “safest town in America.”

Well, obviously not. First of all, that’s not a real thing. But more to the point, no one’s going to make an eight-hour streaming series (ending in a cliffhanger) about an actually safe town. Even Sheriff Taylor had the occasion to welcome someone worse than Otis the town drunk into the Mayberry jail. In post-post-war American culture, suburbs and small towns are more often than not a stage for secrets, sorrows, scandals and satire. The stories of John Cheever, the novels of Stephen King, “The Stepford Wives,” “Blue Velvet” and its godchild “Twin Peaks,” “Desperate Housewives” (filmed on the same backlot street as “The ‘Burbs”), “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” last year’s “Grosse Pointe Garden Society,” which I mention in protest of its cancellation, are set there — it’s a long list.

Samira Fisher (Palmer) is a civil litigation lawyer still on maternity leave, a job reflecting her inquisitive, inquisitorial nature. Husband Rob (Whitehall) is a book editor, a fact referred to only twice in eight hours, but which allows for scenes in which he rides a soundstage commuter train to the big city (presumably New York) with boyhood friend and once-more next-door neighbor Naveen (Kapil Talwalkar), whose wife has just left him for their dentist. Samira, Naveen and Rory (Kyrie McAlpin), an overachieving late tween who has a merit badge in swaddling, a recommendation from Michelle Obama on her mother’s helper resume and a notary public’s license, are the only people of color in town, but racism isn’t really an issue, past a few raised eyebrows and odd comment. (“What a cute little mocha munchkin,” says a shifty librarian of baby Miles.) “It’s a nice area,” says Naveen, “and people like to think of themselves as nice, so they try to act nice until they’re actually nice.”

As we open, the Fishers have been tentatively residing on Ashfield Place (“over by Ashfield Street near Ashfield Crescent”), for some indeterminable short time. Apart from Naveen, neither has met, or as much as spoken to, any of their new neighbors, though Samira — feeling insecure postpartum and going out only at night to push Miles in his stroller — watches them through the window.

That will change, of course, or this will be one of television’s most radically conceived shows. Fascinated by a dilapidated, supposedly uninhabited house across the street — the same backlot where the Munsters mansion rose many years ago, for your drawer of fun facts — she’s drawn out into a mystery: The rumor is that 20 years earlier a teenage girl was killed and buried there by her parents, who subsequently disappeared. Rob says there’s nothing in it, and in a way that tells you maybe there is.

Lynn (Julia Duffy), left, Samira (Keke Palmer), Dana (Paula Pell) and Tod (Mark Proksch) form a crew of sleuthing neighbors.

(Elizabeth Morris / Peacock)

Out in the world, she will find her quirky Scooby Gang: widow Lynn (Julia Duffy), still attached to her late husband; Dana (Paula Pell), a retired Marine whose wife has been deployed to somewhere she can’t reveal; and Tod (Mark Proksch), a taciturn, deadpan “lone wolf” with an assortment of skills and a recumbent tricycle. (Their shared nemeses is Agnes, played by Danielle Kennedy, “our evil overlord,” the stiff-necked president of the homeowner’s association.) They bond over wine (drinking it) and close ranks around Samira after the police roust her on her own front porch. By the end of the first episode, Samira is determined to stay in Hinkley Hills, warmed by new friends, enchanted by the fireflies and in love with the “sweet suburban air.”

Weird goings-on in a creepy old “haunted” house is as basic a trope as exists in the horror-comedy mystery genre (see Martin and Lewis’ “Scared Stiff,” Bob Hope’s “The Ghost Breakers,” Abbott and Costello’s “Hold That Ghost” and assorted Three Stooges shorts). Suddenly there’s a “for sale” sign on this one, and just as suddenly, it’s sold. The new owner is Gary (Justin Kirk), who chases off anyone who comes around. Tod notes that the security system he’s installed is “overkill” for a private residence, necessary only “if you are in danger, you have something to hide — or both.” You are meant to regard him as suspicious; Samira does.

Created by Celeste Hughey, “The ‘Burbs” is pretty good, a good time — not the most elegant description, but probably the words that would come out of my mouth were you to ask me, conversationally, how it was. I suppose most of it adds up even if doesn’t always feel that way while watching it. It hops from tone to tone, and goes on a little long, in the modern manner, which dilutes the suspense. The characters are half-, let’s say three-quarters-formed, which is formed enough; everyone plays their part. The Hardy Boys were not known for psychological depth, and I read a lot of those books. A lot. Indeed, depth would only get in the way of the plot, which is primarily concerned with fooling you and fooling you again. When a character isn’t what they seem, making the false front too emotionally relatable is counterproductive; the viewer, using myself as an example, will feel cheated, annoyed. I won’t say whether that happens here.

That isn’t to say that the actors, every one of them, aren’t as good as can be. I’ll show up for Pell and Duffy anywhere, anytime. Proksch, well known to viewers of Tim Heidecker’s “On Cinema at the Cinema,” is weird in an original way. The British Whitehall, primarily known as a stand-up comedian, panel show guest and presenter, makes a fine romantic lead. Kirk is appealingly standoffish, if such a thing might be imagined. As Samira’s brother, Langston, RJ Cyler has only a small role, but he pops onscreen and, having the advantage of not being tied up in any of the major plotlines, provides something of a relief from them. And Palmer, an old pro at 32 — her career goes back to “Akeelah and the Bee” and Nickelodeon’s “True Jackson” — does all sorts of wonderful small things with her face and her voice. She’s an excellent Nancy Drew, and the world can never have enough of those.