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Such speedy exposition involves some heavy-handedness as we meet pompous patriarch David (Simon Bird, The Inbetweeners), long-suffering wife Fiona (Kate O’Flynn), their anxious teenager Rachel (Amy James-Kelly, Three Families) and apocalypse-hungry young son Aaron (Harry Connor). The result is a string of understandably disturbing details about cult life – the violent deaths they expect non-believers to suffer, and the religious Order’s oppressiveness, extreme misogyny and merciless shunning of anyone who steps out of line – which makes viewers wonder: how will the show make such dark subject matter funny?
After all, true crime fans know all too well that real life cults don’t tend to have happy endings, especially for women. Podcasts like My Favorite Murder often tell the story of famous cults (MFM even have merch featuring their catchphrase ‘You’re in a cult, call your Dad’), and they usually end in violence, frequently including deranged male cult leaders brutally murdering women, such as the Anthill Kids, Synanon and the Solar Temple.
So, in an age where senseless violence against women is rarely out of the headlines, a sitcom about a cult needs to tread carefully and ideally avoid ridiculing the victims more than the perpetrators.
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Everyone Else Burns’ David is certainly a figure of ridicule: your typical stuck-up, arrogant bore, a common and amusing character trope in family sitcoms. Only here, he’s also a stern religious patriarch, deciding what his family does, who they see and how they spend their money. He delights in using ‘the David fear factor’ to terrorise daughter Rachel when she wants to – shock horror – apply for university. He destroys the family TV and refuses his wife’s pleas to replace it, and when she finally finds a career she enjoys (essentially selling crap on the internet), he’s so insecure about her newfound autonomy he deliberately causes power cuts as a ‘sign from God to stop’.
While his character does mellow during the series, even with Simon Bird’s considerable comedy skills it still almost feels distasteful to make light of such sinister examples of coercive control when it’s a very unfunny reality for too many women all over the world.
Maybe the discomfort with Everyone Else Burns comes from the fact that David is still holding all the power. In similarly cult-themed sitcom The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, the first scene sees the four ‘Mole Women’ freed from their bunker after 15 years of captivity, and their tormentor – the evil-but-ridiculous Reverend Richard Wayne Gary Wayne (Jon Hamm) – instantly loses his power, so his many atrocities can be viewed from a position of relative safety.
