Death to 2021, review: more Trump and anti-vaxx jokes? Come back, Charlie Brooker!
Charlie Brooker has come a long way since the early days of Screenwipe, the sardonic BBC news review he began in 2006, in which he interrogated the inanities of modern life via wittily-curated footage from EastEnders and Celebrity Big Brother.
But the world has changed, too. And 15 years later, watching Screenwipe’s direct descendant, Death to 2021, the truncheon-across-the-cranium brand of humour for which Brooker is celebrated is starting to seem past its sell-by date.
Death to 2021 – which Brooker didn’t write himself, and in which his direct involvement extends only to “executive-producing” – is blunt-force satire. It arrives at a moment when the last thing audiences need is another angry know-it-all yelling at the top of their lungs. But absence of subtlety is all Netflix’s 60-minute film has to offer, as the likes of Hugh Grant, Tracey Ullman and The West Wing’s Stockard Channing deliver textureless pastiches of archetypes that were, already, generally beyond parody.
Grant, for instance, plays “Tennyson Foss”, a reactionary historian who refuses to do the “wokey-cokey”, and argues that Bridgerton was a hate crime against white men. And Ullman is a Fox News-style American news anchor who tells her viewers that Covid is a liberal conspiracy (while sneakily taking the vaccine). It’s not quite Orwell.
These sketches are interspersed with news footage from January’s riots at the US Capitol in Washington DC, billionaire Jeff Bezos zipping into space in his phallic rocket, and global anti-lockdown protests. The narration is, like last year, by Laurence Fishburne, whose booming tone strips the last subtlety from a script that was critically deficient in nuance to begin with.
Brooker has, in the last half-decade, become Netflix’s resident dystopian seer, having brought Black Mirror to the streaming service after early success with Channel 4. That series forced us to confront uncomfortable truths about how technology has changed our lives; its power lay in how it showed us facets of the modern world that are horribly obvious, yet to which we all somehow act oblivious.
Death to 2021 feels like the precise opposite. It is a negative image of Black Mirror, with nothing insightful or original to say. Carrying on where last year’s Death to 2020 left off, it takes aim at such obvious punch-bags as Donald Trump, anti-vaxxers and Silicon Valley moguls – along with jokes about Joe Biden being old and the Duke of Edinburgh “withdrawing from public life permanently… by dying”.
The assumption seems to be that nobody watching has sat down to a news bulletin since last January. But do Netflix subscribers really need to see Cristin Milioti playing a deranged anti-vaxx soccer-mom in order to understand that conspiracy-theorists are unhinged? Or to watch Stranger Things’s Joe Keery impersonating a social-media influencer who flies to climate-change protests by private jet in order to understand that influencers can be hypocrites?
Amid the seasonal scrum of familiar faces, the only one to crawl away with her dignity more or less intact is Dianne Morgan, who plays a variation of her credulous everywoman character Philomena Cunk. She delivers the most road-worthy joke of the entire hour, comparing Squid Game to The Great British Bake-Off. “There were high-pressure challenges, expressionless hosts, shock eliminations… and, of course, lots of biscuits.”
But if Bake Off zingers are the best you can muster, your satire isn’t going anywhere. Brooker didn’t contribute to this conveyor belt of one-note gags, which is the central issue: they’re clearly intended to emulate his scorched-earth wit. His regular collaborators (and fellow executive-producers), Annabel Jones and Ben Caudell, wrote the script in his absence. He also announced last year that he was taking a break from Black Mirror, feeling there to be little appetite for television about “societies falling apart”.
If and when he revives that show, or returns to this annual one, Netflix will hope the writing is more insightful than the stuff on display here. Death to 2021 flails about, taking wild swings at obvious targets, yet struggling to land even a single punch.
Death to 2021 is available via Netflix now
