Netflix's mockumentary to the bizarro year that was 2020 could not have came at a better time. With faux sincerity and high sarcasm, Death to 2020 was a blackly funny look at how real life just could not be faked. With a cast of talking heads that tried to make sense of the year that passed, or in the case of Lisa Kudrow's politico making sense was equivalent to Trumpian denial, Charlie Brooker et al skewered both the Americans and the British, but knowingly spared the Chinese.
And therein laid the show's biggest fault, it did not know who its targetted audience was and could not really go all out in roasting that group to be the full-on black satire that it so wanted to be.
Ultimately, as funny and as dry as Tracey Ullman, Leslie Jones, Cristin Milioti, Samson Kayo and Kudrow were, the humour never got pushed to beyond a few chuckling or sniggers. The two biggest names, Samuel L. Jackson and Hugh Grant, tellingly one American and one British, may have had the most screen time, but neither were given material piercing enough to matter. Jackson, seemingly was there to add gravitas to the BLM segment, and Grant was just playing another iteration of his bumbling English guy.
There were some good bits like Ullman's Queen Elizabeth II and the skewering of Netflix shows, Jone's behaviour psychologist speaking truth to seemingly absurd human behaviour, and Diane Morgan's "average citizen" bit, but then there were also segments that were initially funny but ran to the ground by Booker with its incessant repetition, like Kudrow's fake news subplot, Milioti's "Karen"-esque behaviour and Grant's confusion of pop culture references with the real world.
And of course we had the whole Kumail Nanjiani tech-giant bit which fell flat and Joe Keery's millenial which could have been relevant but just ended up being tiresome.
Thankfully, the mockumentary only ran for 70 minutes, and it did give a brief, albeit jumbled, summary of the year that was. Who knows what 2021 will bring.
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