Everyone Else Burns

Christian fundamentalism in the UK is relatively uncharted territory when it comes to the popular culture zeitgeist, but it is one which Dillon Mapletoft and Oliver Taylor’s doomsday cult sitcom, Everyone Else Burns, treads with an inflection of suburban charm, even when its fanatically insane characters fall substantially below the charm threshold.

Simon Bird’s David is essentially a reincarnation of Friday Night Dinner’s Adam and The Inbetweeners’ Will, a prickly, righteously disagreeable twerp. Only this time, his disposition underpins something altogether more disquieting. He is the patriarch of a family who partake in the practices of a fundamentalist sect, the name of which sounds like the perfect title for a Monty Python film; The Order of the Divine Rod. We are introduced to David and his nuclear family unit during an apocalyptic rehearsal in the middle of the night. Rachel (Amy James-Kelly), David’s teenage daughter, is petrified of the outcome of her judgement, while her younger brother, Aaron (Harry Connor) exclaims, “Finally”, as he’s awoken in the middle of the night, unaware that this is merely a dress rehearsal. The unit is completed by David’s wife, Fiona, played with an expertly executed deadpan veneer by Kate O’Flynn which masks a burning desire for some transcendence to normalcy.

This desire sees her befriend her neighbour, Melissa, a headstrong woman imbued with the extraordinary comic presence of Morgana Robinson. Meanwhile, David is distracted from the spiritual needs of his family by bitter ambition, as his professional, somewhat one-sided, rivalry with the much slicker, more charismatic Andrew (Kadiff Kirwan) to determine the sect’s new elder, is an all-consuming anxiety for the mop-topped fanatic. It is a plot thread which provides one of many examples of what this show is really about underneath the exaggerated, spiky tone of a sitcom centring on the doomsday Christian sect of suburban Manchester. It is about the mundanity of an oppressive family, and the cut and thrust of professional ambition. As with most successful narrative art, the series makes a fairly decent attempt at combining the alien with the universal; even those who believe the apocalypse is around the corner would quite like to nab that promotion before it rears its head.

It is a show that relies a little too heavily on wisecracks, occasionally deployed at the expense of interesting character development, while its heightened tone can make it seem emotionally impenetrable at times. It is not without a certain allure, which pierces the surface, however. The arcs of Rachel and Fiona provide the show with its humanity, and as it unfolds, it becomes clearer that, for all of David’s posturing, Everyone Else Burns is really about their burgeoning independence and identities. The odd flat one-liner notwithstanding, it is a solidly bingeable affair and, for Bird, a cut above Friday Night Dinner that doesn’t quite scale the heights of The Inbetweeners.

Matthew McMillan

Everyone Else Burns is released on Channel 4 and All 4 on 23^rd January 2023.

Watch the trailer for Everyone Else Burns here: