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  On DVD: Suburban Shootout: Crime and Funishment in Britain
Acorn Media
You've seen Hot Fuzz, right? That British comedy hit satirized, among other things, suburbia and the propensity of some of its inhabitants to believe that they're especially entitled to a pleasant living environment, even if that means taking some, er, extralegal steps to maintain it. Well, obviously something is in the air (or perhaps in the unclean urban water where creative entertainment types live) in England. There's a disdain for the burbs bubbling through the zeitgeist, because here we have Suburban Shootout, which is like Hot Fuzz meets Desperate Housewives. (This sitcom debuted on British TV -- and was shown on the Oxygen Network -- in 2006, before Hot Fuzz hit the screens, but the projects were produced independently and simultaneously; they don't appear to have influenced each other.) Here we have the adventures of Joyce Hazeldine (Amelia Bullmore), who moves with her cop husband from London to the suburban town of Little Stempington, where she discovers the dark side of all those green lawns and dinner parties. Turns out the town is ruled, surreptitiously, by two rival gangs of ladies who lunch ... and kill. Alas, they'd be surprising if they weren't such obvious parodies of buttoned-down, Tupperware-party-hosting, upper-middle-class housewives: Barbara Du Prez (Felicity Montagu) leads the good girls as they off burglars and terrorize rowdy teenagers; Camilla Diamond (Anna Chancellor) leads the bad girls as they shake down local merchants to pay for their plastic surgery and import illegal hormone-replacement drugs to sell to those unsuspecting rowdy teens -- estrogen gives you a mellow buzz, man. These eight episodes (now on DVD from Acorn Media) make up the complete first season of Joyce's adventures in crime, village preservation, and botox -- of course she is quickly seconded in one of the gangs -- but the satire wears thin quickly, and it's hard to like any of these characters, even in a guilty-pleasure kind of way. (Be warned: an American adaptation is coming.) Joyce is pretty dumb -- though smarter than her cop hubby, who never catches on to her misdeeds -- and the rest of them are actively unpleasant. The DVDs' audio commentaries from cast and crew are infectiously entertaining, though: everyone clearly had a ball making the show. Still, there's only so much making fun of suburbia that can be done before you get the urge to do the same thing that actual suburbia inspires any thinking person to do: leave. -=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Comments
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