Yahoo News ‘Everyone Else Burns’ Review: The CW’s British Comedy Laces Doomsday Cringe With Sweetness as Well as Snark
For nearly two decades, The CW wasn’t TV’s most popular network — outside of carefully curated demographics — but it might have been the network most confident in its brand. Shows on The CW looked and felt like they were shows that could exist only on The CW.
Currently, I struggle to find the proper analogy to describe the grab bag of acquisitions that fill The CW’s schedule since the network was acquired by the Nexstar Media Group.
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Is the process of surfing through the CW slate, trying to guess a program’s origins, like taking a road trip with the family and playing the license plate game? “There’s New Mexico! There’s British Columbia! How did New Brunswick get all the way over here?”
Or is The CW’s strategy of picking up motley offerings that weren’t on the radar of Netflix or Hulu or Max more like upending the cushions on your couch and televising whatever you find, be it a windfall of cash or a cairn of orphaned corn nuts?
The new comedy Everyone Else Burns, brought to The CW after its original run on the U.K.’s Channel 4, isn’t quite a treasure, but if you like the couch analogy, it’s definitely like finding a quarter or at least a dime nestled in your sofa. In a fall stripped of new broadcast-friendly sitcoms by the AMPTP’s failure to reach an equitable deal with various industry guilds, Everyone Else Burns is a darkly and appealingly askew take on the family comedy. Led by an excellent core ensemble and showing signs, after the four episodes sent to American critics, of swiftly maturing beyond its initial premise, there’s a lot here that’s worth seeking out, even if it isn’t as clear why the destination of that seeking is The CW.
For those playing the license plate game, Everyone Else Burns is set in Manchester and focuses on the Lewis family, members of the Order of the Divine Rod, a fundamentalist sect with doomsday shadings.
David (Simon Bird) has rebuffed opportunities for advancement at his day job — he’s hilariously a savant when it comes to parcel sorting — because he’s convinced he’s about to ascend to being an elder in the church. He’s so fully invested in that promotion that you can probably assume things won’t go according to plan.
David’s wife, Fiona (Kate O’Flynn), has given up her entire identity to support the church and her family, but when she experiences a wave of success in the world of online retail, she begins to want more from both her husband and her life.
Teenage daughter Rachel (Amy James-Kelly) has dreams of being a doctor, dreams that definitely don’t align with the opportunities afforded by the sect. When she meets Joshua (Ali Khan), a dog walker and Divine Rod apostate, Rachel ponders taboos like caffeine and kissing.
Finally, there’s son Aaron (Henry Connor), a true believer in the faith. Bullied in school for his devotion, Aaron is also a brilliant artist, specializing in tableaux featuring his family and his tormenters burning in various pits of hell.
As conceived by series creators Dillon Mapletoft and Oliver Taylor, the Order of the Divine Rod is generally Christianity-adjacent, but not so directly that anybody likely to watch the show is likely to be offended. It’s a generally patriarchal religion with a hatred of all things modern. David still uses the same cellphone he’s had since 9/11, and the only thing connecting Fiona to secular neighbor Melissa (Morgana Robinson) is that, unlike the Lewises, Melissa has a working television. We spend some time in the church, but what we see of this religion is an assortment of sanitized social clubs and platitude-heavy snippets of prayer. Though anybody with a general awareness of Christian denominations and cult-focused documentaries will recognize elements, you won’t say, “Well that’s totally the Mormons!” or “How very Heaven’s Gate!” too frequently.
Ultimately, Everyone Else Burns has as much in common with Big Love as it does with Mosquito Coast and Freeform’s Praise Petey, but in its 20-minute episodic form, a wry and superficial approach to zealotry takes the place of anything resembling nuance. And that’s probably ideal! If eschewing exotic foreign foods like ramen or placing aggressive restrictions on adolescent dating are the spine of the Divine Rod dogma, it becomes easier to embrace Everybody Else Burns as the story of a disconnected contemporary family than if each episode found the clan protesting at abortion clinics or ranting about woke indoctrination at school board meetings. You know that David probably believes some really grotesque things, but the creators have started to give all four main characters life-changing arcs that should take hold before we hear a church sermon explaining the Divine Rod’s position on trans rights.
Everyone Else Burns works because we’re introduced to these characters with a pilot dominated by very funny and very one-dimensional snark, but by the second and third episodes, all four main characters are becoming more open to the world around them and to each other. That’s how you keep viewers comfortable within a show whose subject matter would probably be very uncomfortable if encountered in real life. David is the most committed to the family religion and the character given the most ideologically distasteful dialogue, but with his implacable narcissism and inherently funny tonsorial similarities to Corky St. Clair from Waiting for Guffman, he instantly fits into a familiar archetype, one that says, “Go ahead and laugh at me, because I won’t notice.”
David is Michael Scott as a minion in a cult, and the show doesn’t rush to make him sympathetic, but Bird’s performance, beyond the impeccable comic delivery that The Inbetweeners fans will recognize even if he’s otherwise unrecognizable, finds that layer of caring deep below the cringe. Director Nick Collett mines much of the show’s best material from the almost wordless interplay between Bird and O’Flynn, who is the show’s clear breakout for me. There’s a manic glint that’s always in Fiona’s eyes, and the series is wonderfully coy about whether that glint reflects fanaticism or escalating dissatisfaction.
James-Kelly is a likable point-of-entry figure for the series, never playing Rachel’s cluelessness for cheap laughs. Her insecurities are relatable and could be at home in any coming-of-age series, not just one that begins with a family doing an early morning apocalypse preparation drill. The sweetness that James-Kelly and Khan bring to the halting romance at the show’s center is the first hint of whether Everybody Else Burns could progress in seasons to come.
As the last member of the core quartet, Connor gets the biggest chuckles in the earliest episodes, and I don’t think the series is shy in its awareness that Aaron is going to need a lot of therapy.
Four episodes isn’t enough to tell if that’s the direction in which things are going, but Everyone Else Burns has hints of a Schitt’s Creek level of upside in which early broad punchlines built around a single easy joke and a central family give way to more of a community portrait and to a tone with more heart. Already I’ve got some affection for the characters played by Robinson, Al Roberts as a more progressive elder in the church and, especially, Lolly Adefope as a teacher who sees and nurtures Rachel’s potential.
With its British origins, Everyone Else Burns may take a while to develop into that upside, six episodes at a time, but the show has already been renewed for a second season. If this were an acquisition on Amazon or HBO, I’d praise it as fitting into a certain prestige comedy pedigree, and even if The CW’s own articles of faith are a bit confusing, Everyone Else Burns deserves that sort of attention.
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