How does one cope with a year filled with a dangerously high death toll, multiple environmental disasters, and back to back social movements calling for reform? By making a movie. At least that’s what Black Mirror creators Charlie Brooker and Annabel Jones decided. The hour-long Netflix mockumentary Death to 2020 premiered in the last week of December, a few days prior to New Year’s Eve. The movie features a number of fictional characters played by an all-star cast; Samuel L. Jackson, Lisa Kudrow, Hugh Grant, Kumail Nanjiani, Stranger Things’ Joe Keery (who recently starred in the new horror movie Spree), and Saturday Night Live’s Leslie Jones, just to name a few.
It chronicled every recent event with cultural relevance as cast members added commentary to real-life news streams of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and the 2020 United States Election, and everything in between like; the Australian Wildfires, the Black Lives Matter movement, the removal of the English statue of slave trader Edward Coulston, and all of the drama that has followed Prince Harry and Meghan Markle. Despite its obvious satirical and comedic nature, the movie wasn’t a widespread success. As of now, despite having high user ratings on IMDb and Google, it has low critical ratings on Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic as it has been poorly reviewed by many acclaimed entertainment publications. Here are a few reasons why.
An often go-to example of political parody is Saturday Night Live, a show that has built its popularity on overexaggerating popular social figures. In Saturday Night Live, while the characters resemble key characteristics and the appearance of the emulated icons, the qualities are amplified to an extent where the character is almost unrecognizable. Death to 2020 did not follow in these footsteps. The movie did not impersonate any well-known figures, rather it chose to create typical-but-original, characters. It featured characters such as; Duke Goolies, “a gig economy millennial”; Jeanetta Grace Susan, “a non-official conservative spokesperson,” and Kathy Flowers, “a self-described soccer mom.”
Kathy Flowers, the “Karen” character, played by How I Met Your Mother’s Cristin Milioti, looked and behaved as if she walked right out of a viral Twitter video as she delivered lines like, “They said there were more mail ballots than ever, what about female ballots?” The acting was excellent and the lines were delivered effortlessly by the movie’s extremely talented cast, but it felt all too familiar which left nothing to laugh about. The same can be said about Lisa Kudrow’s Jeanetta Grace Susan who emulated real-life figures like White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany and political commentator Tomi Lahren.
As established, Death to 2020 wasn’t a Saturday Night Live-esque picture. Additionally, it took zero pieces of inspiration from Black Mirror or American Horror Story: Cult, there was zero creation of a “Bad Place.”
With the lack of unfamiliar territory or creepy, horror-like “this is where we are heading” vibes, the jokes delivered by the movie’s characters felt like casual living-room commentary over a standard news stream. However, that may have been intentional from creator Charlie Brooker who believes that the current state of the world is dystopian-enough. In an interview with The Guardian, he shared, “I get the dystopian vertigo of it [real life] every time I pick up the kids from school: enter this way, exit that way, keep two meters apart, wear a mask.”
Although Brooker described Death to 2020 as “part record of the year, part spoof documentary and part character comedy,” the last two parts did not seem to be properly delivered or received. Without going the dramatization or the dystopian route, Death to 2020 didn’t bring anything new to the political satire or dark comedy genre. The movie was unimaginative and harsh, it felt like a million “too soon” jokes delivered consecutively.
While many movies and television shows draw inspiration from current events and tragic moments, there has been a continual debate about whether or not movies and television should embrace the new reality of the pandemic or ignore it. Popular shows likeGrey’s Anatomy and Shameless and have reworked their newest seasons to include the pandemic but simultaneously, they offer escapism into their respective already-established fandoms— something that Death to 2020 doesn’t already have.
While promising in its title and creative team, Death to 2020 failed to embrace the very thing they tried to accomplish; they didn’t commit to a form of delivery, be it a more-serious mockumentary, a satire, or the creation of a dystopian world. 2020 was rough enough and there didn’t seem to be a need for additional commentary. However, as proven by the movie’s varying reception, it is arguable whether the criticism is due to the quality of substance available from last year’s events or if it is poor production value.
Death to 2020 is now streaming on Netflix.
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