Death to 2020, review: a disappointing rehash of tired jokes and predictable satire
One of the laziest gags flying round social media in this cursed year was that 2020 has felt like an episode of Black Mirror. It’s no surprise then that the creators of the dystopian sci-fi series, Charlie Brooker and Annabel Jones, couldn't resist treating their Netflix paymasters to the sort of end-of-year scowl that Brooker used to reserve for the BBC via his annual Wipe series. Death to 2020 takes the parody talking heads format used by Wipe and gives it the Netflix sparkle – the eye-catching cast dissecting 12 awful months includes Samuel L Jackson, Hugh Grant, Tracey Ullman and Lisa Kudrow. Quite an upgrade on Jake Yapp and Limmy.
It is a huge disappointment. Between them the assembled parody of experts, pundits and onlookers talk us through the various extremes of 2020 – Australian bush fires, the US election, Harry and Meghan, Black Lives Matter, Covid-19 – and allow the viewers to wallow in the self-satisfied satire. You expect greatness from Brooker, but the jokes here are as predictable as the targets of the jokes, only occasionally rising above the quality of this year’s dreadful Spitting Image reboot. At least that had funny puppets.
Donald Trump gets a good kicking (he’s a bit thick!), so too Boris Johnson (he’s a bit scruffy!). Conspiracy theorists and coronavirus truthers are mocked, the US police is savaged for the killing of George Floyd, Big Tech companies are lampooned for allowing fascism to thrive. Not a fish is left swimming in the barrel. It's fun, but only if your idea of fun is watching 70 minutes of Hollywood stars reading out jokes from The Mash Report.
Too often the characters themselves get only one joke, which they are obliged to flog relentlessly, such as the Wasp soccer mom who – you’ll never believe this – turns out to be a frothing racist. Far better is Grant’s historian, Tennyson Foss, who adroitly captures the pomposity of the Grand Old TV Don. Diane Morgan, who became a star thanks to her brilliant performances as the stunningly dim Philomena Cunk in the Wipe series, turns up too, as the “average citizen”. It is Cunk in all but name and adds to the nagging feeling that Death to 2020 if a bit of a knock-off.
Some jokes are sharp and carry Brooker’s acidic wit and giddy surrealism. Fire is described as “a radicalised, angry form of air”, a feckless millennial pats himself on the back over Black Lives Matter because he “sent friend requests to a lot of black people” and, in an otherwise jarring segment in which the cast discuss all the Netflix programmes they watched in 2020, Ullman’s Queen Elizabeth gets an absolute zinger about how “refreshing” she finds The Crown. A repeated joke about Joe Biden’s age eventually bears fruit.
The problem is that most of the jokes – and observations – here, we’ve all already made, lazily, on social media, time and time again. Death to 2020 tramps over ground we are at best wearily familiar with, at worst utterly sick of. Brooker, once, would have satirised a show like this. A TV comedy creating its script out of other people’s Twitter jokes? Now there’s an episode of Black Mirror.
