The comedy designed to put the fear of God in you
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Everyone Else Burns
SBS On Demand from December 7, SBS Viceland from January 29 at 9:25pm
★★★★
Despite the presence of The Inbetweeners′ Simon Bird as the overbearing patriarch of a family of godbotherers who eagerly await Armageddon, I’m not sure this six-part series from Britain’s Channel 4 is strictly speaking a sitcom.
Amy James-Kelly as Rachel, Kate O’Flynn as Fiona, Simon Bird as David and Harry Connor as Aaron.Credit: SBS
Sure, there are plenty of laughs to be had, not least from Bird’s insanely bad hairstyle and utterly grating manner, but at its heart Everyone Else Burns is a family drama with plenty of heart to balance out its healthy scepticism.
When we first meet David (Bird) it’s the middle of the night and he’s rousing his family, consisting of wife Fiona (Kate O’Flynn), daughter Rachel (Amy James-Kelly) and son Aaron (Harry Connor), to head for the hills because the end of the world is nigh.
It’s just a training run, of course, but David wants them to be ready for the Rapture (you know, the one in which everyone but the chosen few will be burnt to a crisp in the furnace of eternal damnation) when it finally comes.
He’s a twat, is David. The sort of twat whose bigotry and judgment is matched only by his certainty that he is right. But when he is passed over for promotion as an elder in the Order of the Divine Rod, things begin to unravel ever so slightly.
Kate O’Flynn as Fiona in Everyone Else Burns.Credit: SBS
Fiona discovers an entrepreneurial streak and begins to think unholy thoughts about her neighbour Andrew (Kadiff Kirwan); Rachel has her sights set on university (where did we go wrong, her parents ask); and Aaron stops drawing pictures of his father meeting a grisly end and instead trains his considerable skills on portraits of Jesus and John the Baptist gazing longingly into each other’s eyes, their perfectly toned abs rippling righteously.
Clearly, deliverance from the old certainties is where we are going. But this isn’t a straightforward redemption tale. Writers Dillon Mapletoft and Oliver Taylor have way too much respect for their creations to merely set them up so they can be knocked down.
Temptation and doubt litter the path to this family’s enlightenment, but their core beliefs, in their god, in their values, and ultimately in one another, remain intact. Well, more or less.
Kate O’Flynn is a quiet revelation as the long-suffering Fiona, matched with her husband by the church elders 18 years earlier. Her bitterness manifests as devotion, but anyone just a little less self-obsessed than David couldn’t fail to taste it.
Amy James-Kelly is terrific too, bringing a palpable sense of confusion and fear to Rachel’s tentative gestures towards independence.
Bird has spoken in the past about The Inbetweeners as something of a mixed blessing; it was enormously successful and popular, but he hasn’t exactly been inundated with offers in the nine years since he last played uber-nerd Will McKenzie in the second movie spun-off from the three-season series.
But with a second season of Everyone Else Burns already in the works, it seems salvation may finally be at hand.
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