Keke Palmer Was Initially Off About Who the Real Villain Was in “The Burbs” (Exclusive)

Palmer stars in Peacock's new mystery-comedy series, which features several suspicious neighbors and arrived on Feb. 8

Warning: This post contains spoilers for The Burbs.

NEED TO KNOW

• Keke Palmer is dishing on who she thought the real villain would be in her new series, The Burbs
• The dark comedy from Peacock follows Palmer’s Samira and her husband Rob (Jack Whitehall) as they move into his old neighborhood and quickly learn that things aren’t as they seem
• “I definitely was suspicious,” Palmer tells PEOPLE of one character in particular

Keke Palmer is all for a good mystery, but even she couldn't quite put her finger on who was really pulling the strings in The Burbs when she first read the script.

Ahead of the release of Peacock's new eight-episode dark comedy, which stars Palmer as new mom and new neighbor Samira, the Emmy winner caught up with PEOPLE about her first-read suspicions. But the mastermind of the series wasn't exactly who she thought it was.

"I felt like I had no clue," Palmer, 32, says. "I definitely was suspicious of Rob. I was definitely suspicious of Samira's husband [played by Jack Whitehall], but I felt like that was way too obvious for it to be the husband. And again, one of those fun suburban tropes that it's always the husband. So I knew there was no way that it could be that."

She adds, "I was just like, 'I'm so interested to see where this is going.' I think the pilot is so unique in that way where you're just kind of unsure what you're watching, but you can't look away. And I think the rest of the series is much like that, even though you start to fall in love with these characters and really kind of understand the world they're living in."

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The Burbs, created by Celeste Hughey and adapted from the 1989 Tom Hanks film of the same name, follows Palmer's Samira and Whitehall's Rob as they move back into Rob's old stomping grounds of Hinkley Hills — a community where each neighbor appears to have a secret of their own. While the neighborhood is touted as being the "safest town" in the U.S., Samira quickly learns that not all is as it seems when she discovers that even her own husband is keeping things hidden.

Palmer wasn't too far off to have her suspicions about Rob upon first glance. The character, as fans learn in the early episodes, isn't entirely truthful about his past, as he fails to disclose to Samira that he was friends with a girl named Alison. The teen girl's disappearance 20 years prior and her creepy vacant childhood home (later purchased by another secretive new neighbor, played by Justin Kirk) are only one aspect of the mysterious stuff going down in Hinkley.

But the character actually bringing chaos to Hinkley is hiding in plain sight, all while Samira, Rob and their new friends try to put the puzzle pieces together. The cast is rounded out by Paula Pell, Julia Duffy, Kapil Talwalkar, Mark Proksch and more, with all eight episodes having arrived on Peacock on Super Bowl Sunday, Feb. 8.

Hinkley Hills has its secrets, just as the cast had their own secret for gelling well on screen. "I would honestly say [it's] our love for comedy and not in like a superficial kind of way," Palmer says. "But in this way that it's probably saved us more times than we'd even want to mention in terms of the way that we process the world."

She adds, "There's so much heaviness that's always happening and I think that this show is really about finding a way through that, through community, through heart and with humor, not as something to hide things, but as a way to literally metabolize them. Sometimes that's the easiest way to get things down, to help you sober up and just be able to face them head on."

Among the twists that threw Palmer off, the actress and executive producer points to the discovery of what actually happened to Alison — as well as the "cliffhanger" ending that finds Talwalkar's Naveen in a very, very uncomfortable position.

"I love the Scooby Doo kind of thing we got going on, me and the whole gang," Palmer says of what she's hoping for next in Samira's story. "I feel like we got to keep on uncovering the many mysteries of Hinkley Hills and just doing the good work."

All eight episodes of The Burbs are now streaming on Peacock.

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