The 'Burbs Creative Team on Season 1 Ending & Hopes for Season 2
The 'Burbs producers tells us all about that ending and their hopes for the show's future.
**SPOILER WARNING! This story reveals spoilers about Peacock's 'The Burbs series!**
If you've already binged your way through Peacock's new mystery/thriller, The ‘Burbs (now streaming on Peacock), we get it. Frankly, who could resist the juicy suburban secrets fueling the mysteries?
The series is loosely based on the 1989 film of the same name (now streaming on Peacock), but this version stars Keke Palmer (Nope) and Jack Whitehall (The Afterparty) as Samira and Rob Fisher. They're one-year into their marriage with a newborn to boot, and find themselves relocating from the city to the suburbs, settling into Rob's family home in Hinkley Hills, "the safest town in America."
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Tucked safely into a cul-de-sac on peaceful Ashfield Place, all should be well for the Fishers. However, the sleepless nights of baby colic and Rob heading back to work put Samira's lawyer brain into overdrive as she gets hyper-fixated on the long-abandoned Victorian home across the street. Recently purchased by the slightly creepy Gary (Justin Kirk), Samira and her equally nosey neighbors (Paula Pell, Julia Duffy, and Mark Proksch) want to know his deal, and solve the unsolved missing persons case of the former resident, Rob's high school friend, Alison Grant.
After plenty of misdirects and even a mini rupture in Samira and Rob's trust, the truth comes to light in Season 1's finale episode, "Only One Way Out." Below, with a little help from the series' creator/showrunner and one of its executive producer, we unpack everything solved and unsolved about The 'Burbs Season 1.
What happens at the end of The 'Burbs Season 1?
Over the course of the season, it gets revealed that Gary's "wife" Betsy is actually Alison Grant, and she's returned to get to the bottom of who kidnapped her when she was a teen. As it turns out, the culprit was the local trash man, who is still on the trash route, and returns to finish the job of un-aliving Alison. However, his comment to Alison and Samira that, "I just get paid to take out the trash," makes Samira suspicious that he was just a hired hand and not the brains behind the kidnapping.
Alison ends up getting the ultimate revenge when she knocks the trash guy into a piece of exposed rebar and he dies. They're able to explain it to the police as an assault, where he tripped and died from his fall onto the metal. Alison gets her closure, says a real goodbye to former childhood friends Rob and Naveen (Kapil Talwalkar), and leaves Hinkley Hills on her own terms.
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Meanwhile, Naveen takes that as his cue to sign his divorce papers and move on with Kate, the cute girl that he met at Drinkley's, the local bar. He invites her over to his place for a romantic dinner.
Outside at the neighborhood Wine Time porch chat, Samira is still perplexed by the garbage man's last words and wonders aloud if recently retired HOA president Agnes (Danielle Kennedy) has been disappearing people for decades to keep up Hinkley Hills' reputation (and property values)? Maybe she hired the garbage man to do her dirty work? Supporting that theory, Samira and Rob find out that Kate is actually the HOA secretary and another of Agnes' minions; the same woman we see has just poisoned Naveen's dessert and then stuffed him into her car trunk and zoomed away. Cliffhanger, engaged!
Is The 'Burbs a limited series?
Speaking to that very open-ended cliffhanger in the season finale, executive producer Erica Huggins told Peacock Blog during a 2025 set visit that their intention was to keep the mysteries going. "It's definitely going to continue," she confirmed.
"We get to the end of the season with a big 'a-ha!' of what we've been tracking through this particular season," Huggins said of the central mystery with Alison. "But something bigger comes up at the end that reveals a bigger problem. So, it's a continuation of the same characters. It's a continuation of some of the same story lines, but the end reveals a bigger sort of problem that they have to tackle."
Could it be an Agnes orchestrated neighborhood conspiracy of power, or something else? We'll have to wait and see if Season 2 gets the green light.
What are the plans for The 'Burbs Season 2?
Series creator/showrunner Celeste Hughey said during the writing of The 'Burbs Season 1 that a second season was always talked about too. "We're like, 'Okay, we'll save that for Season 2 and we're gonna do this, and this character comes in then,'" she said of their growing pool of ideas. "Even on set, with the cast as well, we're like, 'In Season 2, they'll do this.'"
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While an official Season 2 is yet to be announced by Peacock, Hughey said as of last summer that they hadn't "fully mapped out" a Season 2, but they would be ready. "We know what the 'Big Bad' is in the second season and what new adventures they'll get into," she teased. "And we haven't mapped it out for five years, but definitely we can see the vision for the next several seasons.
"Some people leave so that makes room for other characters," she said of cast expansion. "Some people can come back. Like in the movie Art Weingartner [Rick Ducommun], his wife is not seen at all in the whole first season, and then comes back right at the end. And we have that with Paula [Pell]. Her character, Dana, talks about her wife the whole season, so I'm hoping next season to have her come in."
Catch both The 'Burbs series starring Keke Palmer and The 'Burbs film starring Tom Hanks, streaming now on Peacock!
