Series writers and creators of Channel 4 sitcom, Everyone Else Burns, Dillon Mapletoft and Oliver Taylor, explain how they created the show about the Lewis family, god-fearing Mancunians convinced the end of the world is nigh.
The show stars Simon Bird (The Inbetweeners), Kate O’Flynn (Landscapers), Amy James-Kelly (Military Wives) and Harry Connor (Robin and the Hoods) who are joined by Sian Clifford (Fleabag) as Maude, an imposing new member of The Order for the sitcom’s second run. The show is produced by Jax Media UK (part of Imagine Entertainment) and Universal International Studios, a division of Universal Studio Group
Dillon Mapletoft: Hi, I’m Dillon Mapletoft.
Oliver Taylor: Yes, he is.
Dillon: And we’re going to talk about making series two of our Channel 4 comedy series Everyone Else Burns in clunky back-and-forth prose.
Oli: Everyone Else Burns (EEB) is our baby. We’ve worked on a bunch of different projects together but EEB is the one we feel the most personal ownership over – we birthed it, we nourish it, and occasionally we disassemble and reassemble it at the last minute to make it better. But always filled with love.
Dillon: Oli and I both don’t have children.
Oli: Yes.
Dillon: In case you missed series one, the show is centred around a hyper-religious family in Manchester who believe the end of the world could arrive at any time. When people ask where the idea came from, I tend to point to my own upbringing in a hyper-religious family in the North of England, and how lonely, conflicted and terrified I felt as a 12-year-old kid fearing the end was about to come.
Oli: Some people wouldn’t necessarily see the potential for a family comedy in those ingredients but, we never pretended to have healthy brains.
Dillon: When we landed on this story world, what really excited us was the chance to make a family-centred coming-of-age comedy in a world that people hopefully haven’t seen before.
Oli: Growing up feels a bit different when the most conservative members of your community consider University a ‘moral hazard’ and your go-to pastime is a board game called BibleOpoly.
Dillon: The very first scene of series one is the family ‘practicing’ for the apocalypse – and this one, I should say, did not actually happen to me. That idea came from an evangelical online forum where a dad was boasting about dragging his wife and kids up a hill in the middle of the night after lying that the rapture was upon them. It seemed to play really well with the other dads on the forum.
Oli: Yeah, they loved it.
Dillon: Casting was always going to be crucial to making this series work and we couldn’t be happier with the group we and our Casting Director Aisha Bywaters were able to put together. I genuinely think Kate O’Flynn is one of the best actors in the UK full stop. She somehow manages to portray 17 years of claustrophobic marriage using only her eyes.
Oli: And we’re so honoured to have Simon Bird as our kind of live-action Homer Simpson, as well as Harry Connor, the most talented 13-year-old we’ve ever met, in his breakout role.
Dillon: Last but by no means least, Amy James-Kelly is such a brilliant anchor for the show and manages to earn these moments of vulnerability and heart amidst all the chaos.
Oli: For series two, Aisha Bywaters knocked it out of the park once again with the addition of Sian Clifford. The second we found out that she was going to play Maude, we added approximately 400% more lines for her character, because her eerie charisma and comic timing is just amazing.
Dillon: Someone on Twitter said she has the same energy as the penguin from Wallace and Gromit and we couldn’t be happier.
Oli: But it also means so much to have a shared vision behind the camera – to have everyone committed to prioritising the comedy. And for series two, we were so happy to be able to bring on board Jamie Jay Johnson as Director, Ed Tucker as Director of Photography, and Olly Cambridge as our on-the-ground Producer.
Dillon: Jamie is so unselfish and understands comedy so well. We always aspired to make a dense, high gag-rate show, as opposed to a dramedy or a ‘sadcom’, and he, Olly and Ed really bent over backwards to sell it visually. We didn’t want to ignore the weightier themes that connect to this world, but it felt way more exciting (and challenging) to try to find the comedy in everything we could and earn those moments of vulnerability, rather than have drama be the default setting.
Oli: Somehow, in the tightest of schedules, Jamie, Olly and Ed even found time for us to shoot alt lines and bank some improv takes with our incredibly talented group of ensemble cast (shout out to Al Roberts, Morgana Robinson and Kadiff Kirwan, to name but a few). Everyone on the production really committed. Our Costume Designer Sara Hassan and her team were so inventive that we rewrote parts of episode six (the wedding) to make use of their ideas.
Dillon: And Production Designer Luana Hanson’s art department poured so many details into the world – from an ornate cardboard church for the family cat to sleep in, to Lenin-esque pictures of Arsher Ali (Elder Samson) and a wedding buffet that included a jelly made out of spaghetti hoops.
Oli: An image that’s both funny and deeply upsetting.
Everyone Else Burns series two is available to stream now on Channel 4.
Jon Creamer
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