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Death to 2020 Review: A Cathartic and Hilarious Eulogy
2020 is now literally a Black Mirror episode
Charlie Brooker has made a Netflix special about 2020.
Charlie Brooker, the British satirist behind Black Mirror, the rather serious anthology series about technology gone wrong. 2020’s compared to Black Mirror so often it’s cliché. Now it’s basically in the show’s canon.
Death to 2020, now streaming, differs from its sister on Netflix in both tone and format. But intact is Brooker’s eye for dystopia within both the absurd and mundane.
It’s a comedic documentary, narrated deadpan from the future by Lawrence Fishbourne. Brooker’s offscreen director interviews both important and ordinary people from 2020 — all played by actors and comedians.
Most don’t stray far from the tropes, but instead commit to them successfully. Hugh Grant inhabits a posh, pretentious historian. Leslie Jones’ behavioral psychologist voices the “lol nothing matters” sentiment that’s the closest America has left to a national consensus. Tracy Ullman steps into the shoes of Queen Elizabeth the First (Part 2), who first met Joe Biden when he attended her coronation as an old man.
Not all the film’s characters land: Lisa Kudrow plays an obligatory Kellyanne Conway-type that…
