The Biggest Challenge Facing Peacock’s ‘The ’Burbs’ Was Hiding a Set Everyone Already Knows

There goes the neighborhood.

Series creator Celeste Hughey’s Peacock spin on “The ‘Burbs” brings Joe Dante’s 1989 original dark comedy starring Tom Hanks into the modern age. Jack Whitehall and Keke Palmer star in the roles created by Tom Hanks and Carrie Fisher, whose staycation is disrupted by suspicious new neighbors. In Peacock’s 2026 series version, Whitehall and Palmer are newly married and relocating to his childhood town.

During IndieWire’s Craft Roundtables panel, series production designer Susie Mancini spoke about fixing up the 1989 classic to retrofit it to a contemporary story.

The neighborhood was built out on “Colonial Street at Universal, which is used probably for 60 percent of our productions and TV shows,” she said. “So that was the first challenge: ‘How do we make one of our sets different from what everybody has seen, whether they’ve known it or not, for many years?'”

That same location, by the way, is where Joe Dante’s Universal movie shot in the summer of 1988, with Colonial Street serving as film’s central cul-de-sac.

“We had to do a lot of greenery, change as much as possible from the exterior of all these houses. We had to do a lot of work that was not expected to make it different, but also to make it feel like also still just a neighborhood that doesn’t feel too elevated or too weird,” she said. “Then the houses inside, how do we give the personalities of these characters so that they’re somewhat inspired from the movie but it’s a different persona?”

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