Black Mirror creators Charlie Brooker and Annabel Jones drop Death to 2020 on Netflix over the holidays and deliver what seems to be a bad joke

As soon as Netflix dropped Death to 2020 after Christmas, I checked it out. I told myself if I didn’t laugh out loud in the first five minutes, I’d flip back to my anime series Death Note, but it cracked me up in 30 seconds.

I admit that it got me at Death to 2020, a rather precise wording of my personal feelings, but it helped draw my attention to this 70-minute Netflix mockumentary about “a year so momentous they named it twice” (which made me laugh) that behind it are the creators of Emmy Award-winning seminal series Black Mirror Charlie Brooker and Annabel Jones.

But 20 minutes into the film, despite its mock attempt at inclusivity, taking swings, for show, at the all-white contenders to last year’s Oscar’s, including Little Women about white girls coming into Karenhood, only to be thrown aside by a dark horse, the Asian film Parasite, I realized that even as a viewer I had no real place in the turn of events in a film about a virus that had shaken you, me, and the entire civilization, from Albuquerque to Zimbabwe, to the core.

Replete with real footage of major events, such as the Black Lives Matter protest movement and politicians and celebrities like Tom Hanks testing positive for Covid-19, the spoof documentary is not so much about the pandemic as it is about America being the center of this joke of a time, of Donald Trump being a stupid clown, of Joe Biden being so geriatric that Queen Elizabeth II, as played by Tracey Ullman, claims to have met him at her coronation in 1953, which he “attended as an old man.”

Speaking of Her Majesty, there’s a bit of Britain too, Brooker being British. But overall, it’s just an irreverent, sometimes hilarious spin on the coverage of American affairs on CNN or Fox, world news omitted for irrelevance, save for a few seconds on Wuhan for background purposes.

Suddenly, I don’t have to worry about the worst happening, because it’s happening.

—Charlie Brooker

The cast though, all playing archetypes as fictional talking heads, with narration by Laurence Fishburn—Samuel L. Jackson as a White House reporter, Hugh Grant as a stuffy, bigoted historian who draws parallelisms from Game of Thrones and Star Wars and passes it off as history, Joe Keery as a millennial I-do-everything/I-am-everything gig economy worker, Lisa Kudrow as a political spin doctor, Kumai Nanjiani as a tech mogul patterned after Elon Musk, Cristin Milioti as a Karen and soccer mom Internet-fed with radicalism, Samson Kayo as a virus specialist, Lesley Jones as an angry behavioral therapist, and Diane Morgan as “the most average” of everyman, meaning stupid, whose performances, some better than others, might have been a saving grace, if only the recap of a miserable year didn’t run as insufferably long as this pandemic that, obviously as it is now 2021, we can’t just tuck away yet like a bad dream.

Ok, that last line is a bad joke. Not funny.