How do you make the old-school sitcom – with its improbable plotlines, cartoonish characters and gimmicky setting – feel fresh and relevant in 21st-century Britain? Apparently, the answer is to shun the modern world altogether. Following the devout Lewis family, Everyone Else Burns pitches up in a Manchester-based evangelical church (and doomsday cult) where misogyny, homophobia and a shockingly dated sense of community are all alive and well. It’s deliberately unrelatable material presented in doggedly artificial, stupid hairdo-heavy style. As a contemporary comedy it shouldn’t work, but – by God – it really does.
The brilliance of Everyone Else Burns – now returning for a second series – is partly the result of a script thick with quirky jokes, but mainly down to a cast who are simply a joy to behold. As pathologically incompetent patriarch David, The Inbetweeners’ Simon Bird somehow walks the line between heinously oppressive and heart-rendingly naive: a devotee of his sect’s misogynistic creed, he has zero qualms about being a dinner table despot, yet his unworldliness (he believes that gazing upon the Sun-Maid girl constitutes marital infidelity) and Bird’s utterly un-alpha energy mean he’s more fool than tyrant.
Everyone else excels, too: Kate O’Flynn is supremely awkward as David’s shudderingly repressed trad wife, Fiona, who is continually led astray by naughty neighbour Melissa (the great Morgana Robinson). Funny Woman’s Arsher Ali turns corrupt church leader Samson into an alarmingly gruff villain, while Kadiff Kirwan is subtly unhinged as bereaved yet buff church elder Andrew, admired by Fiona. My personal highlight, however, is the (relatively) young and (relatively) trendy elder Abijah, who gives Al Roberts – of Stath Lets Flats and sketch trio Sheeps – the chance to perfect his comic specialty: tragically nice guys who reek of regret (his Sheeps colleague Liam Williams also returns trussed up in a chastity belt as “fallen congregant” Joel).
Series one covered David’s thwarted ambition to become an elder, his daughter Rachel’s thwarted ambition to become a doctor (those who do tangible good seemingly don’t make it into heaven) and his son Aaron’s non-thwarted ambition to draw extremely accomplished homoerotic drawings of biblical characters. This time, the focus is love and relationships, a theme heralded by Samson’s decision to bring back arranged marriage. Rachel – whose university dreams have been snatched out of her hands and replaced with another pile of pamphlets about the Lord – is paired with himbo and Christian influencer Jeb (the brilliant standup Paddy Young, acing his debut TV role), after deciding to swerve series one love interest Josh (Ali Khan), an erstwhile outcast from the church who also happens to be Samson’s son. Josh is matched with the amazingly irritating Heather (Olivia Marcus), whose whispery voice belies threatening tendencies.
Meanwhile, Fiona pursues an openly hostile Andrew in wonderfully ungainly style as a mysterious church-goer called Maude (Fleabag’s Sian Clifford) pursues David. The latter storyline, in which the imperious Maude tries to destroy the Lewises’ marriage because she believes David is “pliant”, is the show’s one weak link, and a reminder of why this style of sitcom fell out of fashion. As a character and plot device, Maude – who has no intelligible backstory – feels hollow; the sheen of humour is there in her bossy manipulation but the comic substance is missing.
That said, Maude does highlight how right everything else remains. It may cling to stylistic tropes – scenes zip along in a haze of almost-predictable gags, while established sitcom mechanisms mean crises always resolve – but nothing about the setting or characters feels cynical or shallow. It’s close to impossible for new comedy writers to get a TV series commissioned that isn’t at least semi-autobiographical and this is no exception: Dillon Mapletoft, who co-created Everyone Else Burns with Oliver Taylor, did grow up as a fundamentalist Christian. While the show makes no obvious attempt to mine authenticity from this fact, it does account for the sense of empathy woven into the show – characters are ludicrous, but never treated with contempt.
Everyone Else Burns isn’t devoid of weighty themes, either. In one storyline, Aaron and Andrew team up to fight homophobia in the church, but the tone of the show is one of omnipresent jest. As a satire of ultra-conservative attitudes, it embraces the frisson of transgression that comes with showcasing David’s household autocracy, but it also punctures these ideas in a satisfying fashion, resulting in something cathartically progressive but never preachy.
In fact, the only message the show seems interested in spreading is the continued worth of its chronically lighthearted genre. God may not end up saving the Lewis family’s souls, but he might just have saved the sitcom.
• Everyone Else Burns is on Channel 4 now in the UK and SBS in Australia.
