Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Death to 2021’ on Netflix, Where Scripted Bits Bounce Off Real News For A Fake Look Back On Another Crap Year

Black Mirror creators Charlie Brooker and Annabel Jones surveyed the ravages of Our COVID Year with Death to 2020, and their Broke and Bones production company is back for more with the mockumentary Death to 2021 (Netflix). The hour-long comedy special featuring an ensemble cast – including returning members Hugh Grant and Tracey Ullman – is currently burning up the Netflix Top 10, just in time for this latest ugly year to mercifully conclude.

DEATH TO 2021: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: “I expect you want to know my preferred pronouns,” says an irritated Tennyson Foss (Hugh Grant) as a crew member prepares for him for an on-camera interview. “Well, I don’t have any. I do not dance the wokey-cokey.” An unseen producer says he was just asking the fuddy duddy-ish professor if they should put “OBE” after his name.

The Gist: With that intro, narrator Laurence Fishburne takes over with a sobering montage of the year that “made 2020 feel like a mere prequel,” a year “more bizarre than any year in the history of years.” We also meet the scientists, tech entrepreneurs, journalists, TV presenters, and Tik-Tok influencers who will guide us on this journey. (Death to 2021 includes appearances in character by Grant, Lucy Liu, Tracey Ullman, Cristin Milioti, William Jackson Harper, Joe Keery, Samson Kayo, and Stockard Channing.) Fox News-style pundit Madison Madison (Ullman) offers her take. “Did Antifa terrorists infiltrate the count in Arizona disguised as votings machines?” she scoffs on her nightly program Just Asking Questions. Journalist Snook Austin (Liu) says she’d never seen anything as crazy as the January 6 riots, “and I was in the room when Bush knelt before Zod.” Kathy Flowers (Milioti) grimaces as producers play footage of her spelling out MAGA in her own shit smeared on the Capitol walls. “I was writing, and that counts as free speech, actually.” And scientist Pyrex Flask (Kayo) admits that while he was binging the Lockdown hit Bridgerton, he probably should’ve been working on the vaccine.

Death to 2021 continues, its mouthpieces touching on the year in buzz. Woke-ism. What celebrities managed to get themselves canceled. My Octopus Teacher. And before long it’s Spring. Fishburne notes that reaction to the COVID vaccines made “Democrats proud to invoke their right to bare arms,” while Republicans started to reject pricks. And American mom and vax skeptic Flowers returns to tell us that she’s “been doing her own research.”

Rich guys blasting off in dick-shaped rocket ships, rampant climate change transforming water into raging fire, and bemused lords of the tech sector who refer to truth and lies as competing data streams: Death to 2021 skewers it all, and even bounces into geo-politics with a riff on the Taliban’s return to power in Afghanistan. (An influencer says he looked at their socials, and “actually the ‘Ban seem pretty chill.”) And when it finally gets around to year’s end, Death to 2021 is pretty chill about its chilling conclusion: that there are always two sides in America, with each side trying its damndest to kill the other.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Death to 2021 follows last year’s Death to 2020, which remains on Netflix in case you’d like to revisit that twelve-month-long tire fire. And if it’s more year-end specials you crave, Amazon Prime features Yearly Departed Season 2, where female comics lay 2021 to rest.

Our Take: “We found maintaining a sense of limitless fury keeps our users engaged. And if they’re engaged, they must be enjoying themselves. Even if they’re desperately unhappy. In fact, especially then. Because desperate unhappiness also equals greater engagement.” That’s William Jackson Harper speaking as tech entrepreneur and social media company poobah Zero Fournine in Death to 2021. And of course, it’s just that kind of pablum we hear on the regular from the real-life people being skewered here, and 2021 doubles down on that by following Fournine with a clip of Mark Zuckerberg’s stilted video introduction for Facebook’s transformation into Meta. As a joke, this is of the “OK, ha” variety – sure, everybody knows Zuckerberg and his ilk are out-of-touch mega-capitalists with only a sneer for us plebeians. But is it really that uproariously hilarious to see an impersonation of exactly the kind of insidious detachment we’re saddled with out here in the streets? 2021 really did seem like it was trying to kill us. Maybe reliving all of that in broad joke form doesn’t offer the escape Death to 2021 seems to think it will.

Sex and Skin: None.

Parting Shot: “Average British Citizen” Gemma Nerrick (Diane Morgan) is lamenting being ghosted by her latest COVID Zoom crush. But maybe he’s just sick? “Jeff, if you’re watching this with a tube down your throat, please, send me a text to let me know that you’re still alive.” When her phone immediately pings, she excitedly reaches for it, but it’s only a notification that her operating system will update that night. Her gaze glasses over into something between perverse excitement and abject horror. “Something to look forward to…”

Sleeper Star: Cristin Milioti, who was so fantastic in HBO Max’s standout 2021 dark comedy Made for Love, is having a lot of fun here as Kathy Flowers, the American housewife caught up in MAGAworld sloganeering. With just the right absurdist cues and great cutaways to concocted footage that contradicts her protestations, Milioti’s appearances are the closest Death to 2021 comes to the look and feel of SNL’s digital shorts.

Most Pilot-y Line: “He was not a racist,” Hugh Grant’s Tennyson Foss sputters about the departed Prince Phillip, Duke of Edinburgh, who made headlines throughout the course of his life with numerous racist remarks. “He simply had a racist sense of humor!”

Our Call: STREAM IT, but maybe only as a part of a year-end viewing package that will play in the background while you and your friends play a Watch What Happens Live-style “word of the day” drinking game. Death to 2021 hits on most of what made 2021 tick, but it could stand to spin up the humor of it all.

Johnny Loftus is an independent writer and editor living at large in Chicagoland. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, All Music Guide, Pitchfork Media, and Nicki Swift. Follow him on Twitter: @glennganges

Watch Death to 2021 on Netflix