Tomb

I imagine that the pitch session for the British TV series Suburban Shootout (2006) was rather brief. The writers probably just blurted out “Menopausal mafia!” or “Desperate Housewives, only like, Armed and Desperate Housewives!” or perhaps even “Hot Fuzz: The Series.” We get the idea pretty quickly. A seemingly idyllic London suburb is filled with canny middle-aged women who throw Tupperware parties by day, but have Mob-style turf wars when nobody's looking. The local crime rate is zero because the womenfolk pull Uzis on any litterbugs or graffiti-sprayers in the area, but as far as the husbands know, everything is nice and normal.

We view the schizophrenic suburb of Little Stempington through the eyes of Joyce Hazledine (Amelia Bullmore), an innocent who has just moved into the area with her family. She quickly learns that the neighbourhood is at the mercy of two rival gangs of homicidal mommies, but she is blackmailed into secrecy and complicity by the icy Camilla Diamond (Anna Chancellor), the most ruthless woman in town. Camilla's archrival Barbara (Felicity Motagu) urges Joyce to pretend to go along with Camilla's criminal schemes, and to act as a double agent in order to bring the organization down from within. Joyce is terrified, but cooperates, and manages to keep the entire charade a secret from her husband while discovering her own talent for mayhem along the way.

So, it's a dark comedy in which the cast swings back and forth between “Tea and biscuits, dearie?” and “Eat lead, motherfucker!” and I've got to say, that's a tricky dynamic to sustain. Either the violence will get out of hand, in which case the cheerful family facade is gone forever, or all of the gun-brandishing will continue to be of no consequence, in which case we lose all sense of danger. Suburban Shootout mostly falls into the latter trap, Guns get pulled out in every episode, but on the rare occasions in which they are actually fired, everybody misses like stormtroopers. Bombs are invariably non-lethal, with victims staggering out of the wreckage with blackened faces and singed hair.

It's a bit like that episode of The Simpsons in which Marge becomes a Mafia-connected pretzel vendor, only stretched out over eight episodes. Barry Sonnenfeld made a pilot episode of an attempted American remake in 2008, but the show has yet to be picked up. Too bad — this is one of the rare cases in which the material might work better as an American show. The ever-so-British ladies of Suburban Shootout make unconvincing action stars and look supremely uncomfortable with their firearms. Perhaps they should have used swords instead of guns. After all, every single actor in England has performed in 28 productions of Hamlet by the time they're 19, right? Since guns are legally difficult to obtain in the U.K., turn the whole story into a secret female samurai war, and you won't even have to explain why nobody hears gunshots every damn week. The U.S. has gun nuts; England has fencing masters. I say go with your strengths, and give us Suburban Swordfight, with ninja librarians and retirees with hidden blades in their canes.