Zings and a prayer
Everyone Else Burns creators Dillon Mapletoft and Oliver Taylor join star Kate O’Flynn to discuss making the second season of the Channel 4 comedy, being inspired by US sitcoms and creating room for improvisation on set.
While season one of Everyone Else Burns bucked the trend for comedy-dramas with a succession of jokes that landed thick and fast, winning approval from audiences and critics alike, the creators of the Channel 4 series sought to step up the humour in season two.
“The aim was on the page to have a gag rate of a classic American sitcom, and we talked about shows like early The Simpsons, Brooklyn 99 and the American Office,” says Dillon Mapletoft who co-created and writes the show with Oliver Taylor. “We tried to push ourselves to make it dense and as gag-heavy as possible.”
The result is a pacier, funnier show that builds on the band of eccentric characters and complicated relationships forged in season one to expose more quirky antics among the members of the Order of the Divine Rod.
Set within this fictional, puritanical Christian sect, the series centres on the Lewis family, headed by patriarch David (Simon Bird), who is devoted to preparing for Armageddon and avoiding eternal damnation, although worldly temptations sometimes get in the way.
Kate O’Flynn stars as David’s dutiful wife Fiona, who may also deviate from her own dogmatic moral compass, while the couple’s naive 17-year-old daughter Rachel (Amy James-Kelly) seeks permission to go to university and 12-year-old son Aaron (Harry Connor) attempts to fend off his secular school bullies.
Now in season two, which launched in October, relationships are front and centre as Rachel’s drive for independence is threatened by an arranged marriage and cracks widen between Fiona and David. Aaron, meanwhile, will launch a revolutionary bid to drag The Order into the present day (with, and in spite of, his Dad’s help).
Fleabag’s Sian Clifford plays Maude, an imposing new member of the order who threatens to lead David astray, while Paddy Young plays Rachel’s proposed love interest, Jeb.
Mapletoft jokes that he’s “forensically self-critical,” but admits he’s really proud of the work on season two, which saw director Jamie Jay Johnson (Starstruck) join the team and help them push the show on from its season one success.
“In the writing of it, I felt like we ended up finding a really cohesive theme that maybe season one didn’t have so much,” he tells DQ. “We wanted it to all be about relationships and looking at the parents alongside the siblings. It has a cohesiveness to it that I quite like.”
“The hook into this series is Rachel having to go through an organised order-approved courtship, so we realised very quickly it was going to be all about different relationships,” Taylor says. “It was going to be about the parents having their relationship challenged by Maude and about Rachel having a will-they-won’t-they with Josh [Ali Khan], who has returned to the order, complicated by Josh’s courtship partner, who is a bizarre whispering character called Heather [Olivia Marcus], and Rachel’s love interest with an apparently cool-guy Christian called Jeb.”
Everyone Else Burns debuted on Channel 4 in January 2023 and was later picked up by international networks including The CW in the US. A second season was subsequently ordered in May last year for six new episodes once again
coproduced by Jax Media UK and Universal International Studios. NBCUniversal Global Distribution handles sales.
The series finds its roots in Mapletoft’s own upbringing in a “hyper-religious family in the North,” and discussions with Taylor about feeling terrified as a 12-year-old that the world might end tomorrow. They then talked about the idea of telling the story of a normal family going through the everyday problems a family with children would have, while in the background they follow a way of life that makes every decision seem incredibly important.
“We also thought it was just a fresh way to look at a coming-of-age narrative, because there’s a lot of those natural moments that that you go through as a teenager that are difficult anyway, but you end up looking at them slightly differently if you come from that kind of background,” Mapletoft says. “At the heart of Rachel’s journey, she’s thinking about independence and what she needs, but it’s also her first relationship [with Josh] and how does she express herself. It just felt like we could put a magnifying glass on them in a different way.”
The writers, who first met at university performing student comedy, can imagine a version of Everyone Else Burns that is strictly dramatic. But with the intention of writing an out-and-out comedy, they sought to cut through any difficult or thorny issues and just make it as funny as possible.
“It’s naturally a really high-stakes world because as well as the impending threat of Armageddon, if you break the rules, then you get excluded [from the order],” Taylor adds. “We loved the idea of writing a show that has a lot of the traditional elements of a family sitcom but is in a world that you haven’t seen before, and feels very different because of that.”
But writing a sitcom set in an extremely religious setting, Mapletoft and Taylor always made sure they approached story and character from a compassionate angle, never seeking out to make the Lewis family appear stupid because of their beliefs.
“I do think there’ll always be some people who just think you shouldn’t make jokes about religion at all, and that’s fine. You can have that view, but then that’s not an audience for this show,” says Mapletoft, who had watched how other comedies in the past mocked religious people.
“Once people actually sit with the show, we’re quite confident that it really doesn’t feel like we’re mocking anyone or attacking anyone, because that’s not the intention. The intention was just to make the funniest thing and make it mainly about this family.”
“I feel like we’re taking shots, first and foremost, at these characters that we’ve created,” Taylor continues. “Elder Samson [Arsher Ali’s order leader] is manipulating this niche community he has a stranglehold over for his own ego. Abijah [Al Roberts] desperately wants to seem cool. David wants to climb the ranks in season one and become an elder.
“We hope we’ve also managed to capture the huge draw of a community like this at a time where the world is increasingly isolated. We never wanted to be reductive or punch down. We always wanted to be as complex and rich as this colourful set of characters in an interesting world.”
Writing season one, the pair would spend most of their time either in a room together or on a call, while for season two, they blocked out story arcs and would then take more time writing separately before swapping drafts.
Cambridge-based Taylor and Mapletoft, who lives in London, then reunited after the table read to make last-minute script changes before shooting began.
“We were making changes to dialogue very late, until the final week, and we were there on the set for when sometimes actors want alternate lines or sometimes something goes wrong and you have to move a scene location or you don’t have the prop you need,” Mapletoft says. “We were on hand to put out those fires as well.”
“On the positive side,” Taylor says, “some of the costumes were so amazing that we had to make a joke about them, and some of the props were so amazing we had to call attention to them.”
Director Johnson also allowed more time for improvisation on set, letting the actors run with their own lines after a ‘script take’ had been recorded. The writers admit that ad-libbed material from Marcus and Young even made it into the final cut.
“We’ve just got such an incredible cast of comedy performers, so it’s a no-brainer to let them throw stuff in,” Taylor says. “Some of the best stuff in the show came from that and lends itself to that tone of it being comedy first, fast-paced and giving you that ‘just one more episode’ feeling that we’re craving.”
“The Holy Grail you’re looking for in a comedy show is a plot that’s funny on its own and then the dialogue is almost this great window dressing on top of it,” Mapletoft notes. “We tried to make it less static [in season two]. It sounds silly, but sometimes Oli and I spend so much time together, we don’t realise how weird we are and how weird we talk, and how esoteric some of the lines we give characters are. Jamie was really good at being, ‘That’s too weird’ or ‘I don’t understand that.’
“If it’s a dialogue joke and it doesn’t land straight away, then it’s dead. We tried to be like, ‘Hang on a second. Does that really make sense? Is that actually going to land?’ We asked those sorts of hard questions.”
Although there were always “curveballs” that required sudden adjustments, a big bonus of making season two was being able to write for characters who had already been brought to life.
“Kate, for example, is one of the best actors in the UK, period,” Mapletoft says. “She’s incredible. She is so good. She can spin so little into gold, she just brought out this repressed but very funny rage deep within this character in season one, and we’d just be thinking about putting her under pressure in a different way or how she’d react to things. It helps so much to have those voices for sure.”
For her part, O’Flynn returned to make season two buoyed by the opportunity to return to the unique world that had already been established in season one. However, she admits she was nervous about picking up with Fiona and rediscovering a character who had already evolved so much since the start of the series.
“There’s a softening to Fiona in season two,” the actor says. “She’s got everything, supposedly, she wants: the family back together, Rachel is not going to go to university. But actually, the events of season one have maybe put some seeds of doubt in her mind about some of her life choices.
“With the arranged marriage storyline, that throws a light on her and David’s marriage and she’s not able to shut out the doubt as much this season, so things may be starting to unravel for her. She’s open, as well, to Aaron’s journey. She’s more of a supportive mother. She tries a bit harder this time with the kids.”
Seen elsewhere on screen in Landscapers, Henpocalypse and My Lady Jane, O’Flynn was initially drawn to Everyone Else Burns by the “nuanced and developed” characters. “And the jokes were there,” she says. “Then, in Fiona, I felt like I saw something in that character on the page of these yearnings and this repression, and her not able to articulate her feelings and being frustrated in marriage. There was just lots of juicy stuff to tuck into with her.”
Creating Fiona’s awkward behaviour also fitted in with the character and her relationships with other characters, not least with David and Melissa (Morgana Robinson), a next-door neighbour building Fiona’s newfound sense of confidence.
The arrival of Maude in season two then sets Fiona on edge. “Maud represents everything that terrifies Fiona about being a trad wife, I suppose,” the actor explains. “She is quite a force to be reckoned with and is dressed like every character in a horror movie there’s ever been. But also, I knew Sian. Sian and I went go way back because we went to drama school together, so there was a nice chemistry that came out.”
One of her favourite moments of making the show was reuniting with her on-screen family, who she says felt like a real family after going through season one together. “And Simon’s great; he is very chilled out, laid back. He is a voracious reader. He will read between takes and he gets through about five books a week. It’s amazing. And he’s got a good nose for what will work joke-wise.”
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The strength of Everyone Else Burns, O’Flynn adds, is the fact it is set in what might be quite an “alien” world for most viewers, while it is populated by characters you want to root for, with a warmth at the heart of the show.
“You’re not punching down to anyone, and it’s just an odd mix. I don’t think I’ve seen anything like Everyone Else Burns,” she says. “That’s why it works in particular, because it’s unique. Funny is always going to find a way through.”
“It sounds generic, but I really feel that it is better and funnier than the first season,” Mapletoft says of season two. “We get to spend a lot more time with these characters and we’ve really pushed it to make it as pacy and funny as possible.
“I do think one of the strengths of it is that the level of worldbuilding is unlike any anything else that’s really being made right now. If you’re the kind of person that likes to feel like you’re stepping into a new story world, but there’s still enough familiarity of family and coming-of-age and all that to grasp on to it, hopefully you’ll enjoy Everyone Else Burns.”
tagged in: Channel 4, Dillon Mapletoft, Everyone Else Burns, Jamie Jay Johnson, Jax Media UK, Kate O’Flynn, Morgana Robinson, NBCUniversal Global Distribution, Oliver Taylor, Olivia Marcus, Paddy Young, Sian Clifford, Simon Bird, The CW, Universal International Studios