Peacock’s The ‘Burbs is a mystery/comedy series inspired by the 1989 film of the same name starring Tom Hanks. The new series centers around mixed-race couple Samira (Keke Palmer) and Rob (Jack Whitehall), who inherit Rob’s childhood home in what appears to be the perfect suburban neighborhood.
Their cul-de-sac, however, is also the location of a mysterious Victorian-era home, which was recently purchased by a sketchy man after standing unoccupied for years. Samira, who is on maternity leave from her job as a lawyer, becomes obsessed with the house and its new owner, who she swears is up to no good. She rallies a tight-knit group of equally-nosey neighbors, who join her in unearthing the truth about the owner, the house and the neighborhood’s dark past.
Palmer and Whitehall are joined by a cast that includes Julia Duffy, Paula Pell, Mark Proksch and Kapil Talwalkar. Jonathan Furmanski served as cinematographer on the show, shooting all eight episodes, while Jim Flynn handling editing on several episodes. Here, they share insight into the show’s production and post.
How did you each get involved in working on The ‘Burbs?
Jonathan Furmanski: “Celeste Hughey is the showrunner and creator of this reboot. Celeste and I had worked together in the past, but had never quite interacted because she was a writer on a couple of shows that I had done. By the time I’m starting work, her work is wrapping up. So between that kind of connection, and then some other people that we have in common, I think she just decided to reach out. I’m — like a lot of people — a big fan of the original movie, and I was really interested to hear what this new take was on it. When Celeste and I first started talking about it, and I was kind of pitching my idea of what the show might look like, it was great, because our interests really aligned very easily and quickly in terms of this new interpretation, but then also staying true to the satirical tone — let’s call it ‘silliness’ of the original film.”
Photo: Editor Jim Flynn
Jim Flynn: “I did the pilot. And I did [104], which is the festival. And then I did [107], which is the penultimate episode. The way I got involved is through the pilot. Nzingha Stewart was the director and I’ve worked with her a couple of times, most recently on a Netflix series called From Scratch, which has Zoe Saldana, who travels to Italy, falls in love. I don’t want to spoil it, but it gets sad. When Nzingha got this, she had me meet with Celeste and the rest of the team, and we all got along really, really well. Like Jonathan, I remember the movie very, very fondly, and I was curious how they were going to match that sort of tone...They really kind of made it their own and I’m really, really proud of what we were able to do tonally.”
Jonathan, how did your vision align with the show’s production design, which essentially creates the perfect neighborhood, where everything is so clean and colorful?
Jonathan Furmanski: “Actually the camera & lens choices — there was not a lot of heavy lifting in making that decision. I try not to go into any project thinking, ‘I’m going to use this combination.’ I’m not one of those DPs…I seem to want to use something different on every show that I do. And again, that’s not like a thing just to be different. It’s just more like going in with an open mind and thinking, ‘Okay, let’s figure out what this show wants to look like?’ Part of that is talking to Celeste and Nzingha, and talking about what is the language of this show going to be? I do a pitch…way before I’m even hired, about the look, but I’m creating that in a vacuum, so to speak. It’s really trying to find the way that my ideas and Celeste’s vision and Nzingha’s vision. and everybody else’s visions, all kind of align.
“I basically spent a little bit of time testing at Panavision, and we ended up finding a set of lenses very quickly that felt like they gave that kind of clarity that you were talking about. We weren’t going for a vintage look at all. This is a modern-day story and we didn’t want it to look like it’s some other time and place. But the lenses had a little bit of personality, which I thought was important to have…I wanted the lens to add something to the equation, but not to the level that it becomes distracting.
Photo: Jonathan Furmanski during the 16-week shoot
“Panavision makes it easy because they’re really good at it. And then in terms of the broader look and tackling that, and concerns about that, production design, of course, plays a humongous role in what everything looks like. The show would not look like what it looks like if it wasn’t for Susie Mancini, who was our production designer, and her entire team, who were spectacular. Then I just had to start thinking about, ‘We’re going to be spending so much time in these spaces and locations. How can I come up with lighting plans and solutions that enable us to kind of do a lot of different things? And what are ways that we can keep the interest going through eight episodes of television where we don’t feel like we’re just repeating ourselves over and over and again?’ Those are all the things that I kind of kept in mind initially — keeping it feeling fresh through what was 16 weeks of photography.”
What were the Panavision lenses ultimately paired with?
Jonathan Furmanski: “We used the (Arri) Alexa Mini LF. I love the Alexa. I’ve worked with it for years. We chose the Mini LF for two reasons: one was just in terms of reliability and its color pipeline, and how it renders things like skin tones. You can do a lot of work to make any camera give you the look that you want, but it’s a little bit more of a turnkey solution from a camera perspective. I still spent a couple of weeks building our LUT and coming up with our color pipeline. And then the LF component — the large format component — was because we wanted to shoot 2.39. That was something Nzingha mentioned right out of the gate and I was very much into that because that’s a very fun aspect ratio to work with. We didn’t want to shoot anamorphic, so that meant that any Super 35 camera choice, we were working with a very small slice of the sensor. The LF gave us the best of both worlds -— that big canvas, but without any pitfalls.”
The 16 weeks of production sounds like a tight schedule for eight hours of content?
Jonathan Furmanski: “For me, it certainly was. After the pilot, where I had many weeks in prep to kind of come up with everything…I would finish with one director, and on Monday, a new director would show up, who maybe I got 30 minutes to sit down with. It was always just kind of like go, go, go! We had pretty big days every day, but it was also kind of enjoyable. It was relentless, but it was enjoyable in that it was like, ‘All right, we have set up. Let’s figure this out…and come up with the best solution.”
Where is this taking place? Is it on a set at NBC somewhere?
Jonathan Furmanski: “Ninety-five percent of the show was shot at the Universal Lot, and we shot on the exact same back lot cul-de-sac where they shot the original film, so that was fun. People who really love the film, they’ll recognize a lot of the landscape and the architecture. Desperate Housewives was there. Ted was there, so it’s a very familiar place. And our stages were just down the hill. They were like a five-minute golf cart ride. Jim, you were actually not that far away either?”
Jim Flynn: “Yeah, I was right next door to you guys. I would walk over to the set every once in a while. But, to your earlier point, I don’t know that we could have done this schedule if it wasn’t set up that way, because you could always go and take a look at your pre-lighting and stuff, and it was just 100 feet away. You didn’t have to go to another location. All the scouting was done, everything like that. So it kind of had to be the way that it was — shooting on the back lot.”
How far back does production and post go?
Jim Flynn: “My first day, I think, was the table read, where the cast and the crew were all there. That’s when I first heard it. And I thought it was really great out of the gate. And then I’m there day one. So as soon as Jonathan shoots something, I’m looking at it the very next morning, if not earlier.”
That must be helpful to be involved so early?
Jim Flynn: “Oh, it’s really helpful. The sooner I get in, obviously, the happier I’m going to be because I kind of got a sense of what the rhythm of the show was going to be like at that table read. People were reacting. The actors, who are all great, at the table, they all were already pretty much in-character, so you can kind of already get a sense what was working. The kind of rhythms that they’re going to want to perform in and how that might look.”
Jonathan Furmanski: “I really appreciate that somebody like Jim is on board that early in the process as well, especially once you kind of get going. Jim and I didn’t (get to) interact. We did have the amazing post supervisor, Stephanie Johnson, who was running information back and forth between the two of us. But a lot of times, you’re doing a show and you’re kind of thinking, ‘I hope this is all working.’ You kind of rely on the ‘no news is good news’ idea, but you never know.”
Jim Flynn: “Celeste would come into my room — she’s down for a couple hours for lunch or something — (and) see how it’s coming, how it looks. She’s looking at it, obviously, in a broader picture. If there was an issue, or if there was something with an actor or a set, or something like that, she would see it how it plays in a rough assembly.”
Jonathan, are you shooting linearly, meaning episodes 101 through 108 in order, and in order within the episode?
Jonathan Furmanski: “Well, unfortunately, just because of the way the business is kind of built, in terms of different directors coming in, different people being around, and all that kind of stuff, you can’t quite do what we call ‘cross boarding,’ basically shoot out the entire Victorian house for the entire season in 10 days or whatever it would be, which would be extremely efficient. The business, for the most part, doesn’t allow that kind of thinking. Now, that said, within an episode, we can do that, so we streamlined as much as we can within episodes. We shot the episodes mostly in order. I can’t remember why, but for some reason we flipped episodes five and six. It was just a logistics thing.”
Jim Flynn: “To Jonathan’s point, I think as far as shooting Episode 1 and then shooting Episode 2 and Episode 3, it probably was frustrating at times because you probably have 28 scenes to do in this house. It would be nice to light it, do it, be done with it, and put the location behind me.
“From an editorial perspective, it was kind of nice because you’d have the whole first episode, and then you’d have three episodes while they’re kind of doing rewrites on the later episodes. So sometimes I could tell how they were making adjustments, writing wise. You started to get new scripts coming in for the later episodes, and that was probably based a little bit on how the earlier episodes were shaping up. So I think, as frustrating as that might have been, it did have its benefits.”
What were you cutting on?
Jim Flynn: “The show was on Avid, mercifully, because that’s sort of my muscle memory software. I do stuff in Premiere, and lately I’ve been doing some Resolve, but Avid is the first nonlinear system I learned. It’s just a workhorse and the way the project share is so efficient now because at some point, some stuff that was shot for Episode 2 ended up in 1. Some stuff that we shot for Episode 7 ended up in 8. So we could share between editors all the media and all the cuts…We weren’t having to shuffle drives around. It was all sort of internal, which is really, really nice. And it’s just a very powerful tool.”
What was the storage setup?
Jim Flynn: “There’s a main drive. It’s a copy of all the media with a LUT already on it. The system in my room doesn’t have any drives attached at all. It just has a cable that goes to the other room next door. You can also remote in, and the other editors did more remote than I did. I prefer to be in the room with people, and since we are so close to set, I like to be there in case someone wanted to come over and take a look at something. Jump Desktop, I think, is what we used to get into the systems, and that was extremely efficient.”
This isn’t a VFX-heavy show, but I would image there are effects sequences. How did that affect your process?
Jonathan Furmanski: “Well, from a shooting perspective, as you say, every show has VFX these days, whether it’s rig removal or something. We didn’t have anything like what you would consider for a Star Wars or a Marvel kind of a thing, but Stephanie Johnson, our post producer, was a superhero in taking a lot of that stress off of my shoulders. If we had something where, ‘Oh, there’s a light there. We could move it, but it’ll take 25 minutes.' She would just say, ‘Don’t worry about it. We’ll just take care of that later.’ And that provides a lot of relief on shows like this, where you just want to go, go, go. There is a danger of interrupting momentum that you’d never really want to do.”
Jim Flynn: “From a post perspective, there was a handful of shots we knew were going to have effects, and my awesome assistant, Jeff (Castelluccio), would sort of mock stuff up for me. An example I remember at the end of [Episode 1], Samira is looking off sort of in the middle distance and there (are) fireflies in the foreground. Now, we didn’t shoot fireflies. We just had a sort of a plate. I would just give him a plate of a certain length — three-and-a-half seconds or something — and he would put some fireflies in, so that was really, really helpful. We would cut an empty plate — raven’s taking off from the house or something — we put the sound effect of the ravens and the wings flapping and stuff like that, so you can kind of get a sense of ultimately what it’s going to be.”
What would you each point to as a highlight of your work?
Jonathan Furmanski: “There were several sequences that I was really happy with how they came together. The one that really stands out to me is at the beginning of Episode 2. There’s a dream sequence that Samira has where she thinks her baby has been kind of supernaturally kidnapped by some evil spirit in the Victorian house. That was really fun to shoot, but it was also really fun to see when it kind of fully came together. And then something that Jim and I did get to collaborate on was the end of 107, which actually bleeds into the beginning of 108 — the reveal of who the murderer is, and the subsequent chase through the Victorian home that turns into a whole thing in this underground bunker. It was a lot of pieces and trying to make it all work. That was directed by Yana Gorskaya, who did a fantastic job keeping it all making sense, and keeping the train on the tracks. But those two, when I saw them finally come together, I was just like, ‘Wow!’ They were not just fun to, do but they were really fun to watch.”
Jim Flynn: “I agree. Yana is fantastic. She’s an editor, so she knows how to get those pieces. That was a really fun sequence.
“The sequence I might be most proud of was near the end of the pilot. The show is fun and it’s silly, and it has a lot of elements, but there’s a series of events that transpire, sort of the tail end of Episode 1 where Samira decides, ‘I’m gonna get my damn plate.’
“She walks across the street and then there’s these horror elements, so right there, now we’re in a sort of scary moment. And we do this wide shot from behind of this looming house. She turns around, heads back, is locked out, and as she’s sitting there, the police arrive…This all happens within three minutes. She’s back at her house. She’s sad. She’s a little scared. And she is broken hearted, because she’s losing this place that she’s come to love. But the characters, who are wonderful people, come in. They sort of help lift her up, and at the end, she is outside feeling like, ‘I wanna stay here. I wanna be part of this!’
“To get through those gymnastics was really difficult. I think it’s a credit to Jonathan’s work on all of those scenes, and Nzingha’s as well. In the script, I was like, ‘Boy oh boy! Are we going to be able to do all of this back to back to back?' Three scenes from three completely-different genres that play really well to wrap up the end of Episode 1.”