The 70-minute Netflix special should probably have been at least five times longer.
Perhaps it was too gargantuan an undertaking, to try to make fun of 2020 as a whole. Even trying to document this year, without presenting it as a comedy, seems like something Netflix would need to dedicate a ten-part docu-series to, such is the sheer wealth of stuff that happened in these last twelve months. We’re just a handful of days away from the end of it, and it still feels like 2020 could pull off some kind of massive twist-ending, just for the sake of it.
Charlie Brooker, the magnificently twisted mind behind Black Mirror, has previously given the world something similar, with his Yearly Wipe series going back over the previous 52 weeks in a comedic half-documentary, half-mockumentary fashion, but none of those previous years have had the endless Wikipedia page that 2020 will surely have.
With the backing of Netflix, Brooker has called in some huge names – including Samuel L. Jackson, Lisa Kudrow, and Hugh Grant – to play some fictional characters, humorously reminiscing about the year gone by. Some of these work better than others: Kumail Nanjiani, working beyond the terribly named character of Mr. Multiverse, plays a billionaire tech bro who sees no problem in actively playing a part in the downfall of democracy, but on the other end, Tracey Ullman plays The Queen of England, and fails to successfully land a single joke. Oh, The Queen watches The Crown on Netflix because it’s about “normal, relatable people”? Lol, I guess.
This isn’t entirely Ullman’s fault, as the writing is surprisingly hit and miss when it comes to the actual jokes. For every zinger (Diane Morgan describes Joe Biden as “the ticket inspector on a ghost train”), there is a clunker (narrator Laurence Fishburne opens the documentary with “The year was 2020, a year so great they named it twice”… Ugh). In much the same way that Trump’s presidency proved that shows like VEEP are incapable of conjuring up comedic situations as fantastical as what actually can happen, the same goes for 2020: all the jokes you write can’t match the punchlines reality will provide.
Perhaps the best route to take would’ve been to focus on the events that, in any other year, might have been the biggest things to happen, but in 2020 were merely background dressing. Kanye running for President (and bought his wife a hologram of her dead father for her birthday), a swarm of locusts invading Africa, the death of Chadwick Boseman and Kobe Bryant, the arrival of the Murder Hornets, that period of time when everything was cake for some reason, Chris Evans reportedly accidentally leaked his own nudes, the impending arrival of Brexit, and the Pentagon releasing actual UFO videos are just a small number of events that don’t even get mentioned in Death to 2020.
Instead, the special spends the majority of its run-time focusing on two major events – the 2020 Presidential Election, and the Black Lives Matter movement – and even attempting to cover both of these and more across a 70-minute run-time is problematic. These are too big to cover quickly, so by giving them more air than other topics, but not so much as to feel properly in-depth, it smacks of time-mismanagement.
Props should be given to Brooker and everyone else involved in (A) trying to do this at all in the first place, and (B) finish the thing before the end of 2020, despite including footage of events that took place literally just a few days ago.
But this isn’t something that should have been finished in December 2020. This is a year that is going to take a long time to properly digest and pass through our systems, like the turd it truly was. We need some space from 2020 before we can properly look back over it and fully realise its ramifications.
It might be more understandable if the special was more consistently funny, but it simply isn’t, and in the gaps between laughs, you’ll be asking yourself why it isn’t funnier, edgier, just generally better. Sure, the short term appeal of a few laughs at the expense of Rudy Guiliani’s hair crying tears of dye are appreciated, but by rushing to meet this end-of-year deadline, Brooker and co. have failed to rich their usually high comedic standards.
Death to 2020 is available to watch on Netflix right now.
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