Everyone Else Burns; How the Holocaust Began

“Every line has a comic payoff and every character, from the leads down to the supporting players, is well-written. This may be a sect but everything is recognisable: David’s rivalry with church elders Kadiff Kirwan and Arsher Ali, one of the funniest things here, could just as easily happen in the office or at the golf club. And there are truths about family and friends that make it seem like more than a throwaway sitcom.”
Anita Singh, The Telegraph

“The hyper-religiosity is used to look anew at family dynamics and dysfunction; how blind you can be to abnormalities if they are all you know; and the need to break free. Writers Dillon Mapletoft and Oliver Taylor do this without mocking faith itself. Beyond that, it’s simply very, very funny, all the way.”
Lucy Mangan, The Guardian

“Everyone Else Burns had to establish itself sure-footedly, and last night’s double helping of the first two episodes did a solid job. While some of the jokes relating to the church’s teachings were obvious, it was the family dynamic element which hit the mark better. It might not set the world on fire, but Everyone Else Burns – which takes on organised religion with light mockery rather than savage skewering – has plenty of warmth.”
Rachael Sigee, The i

“It is sharply, wittily written. OK, it’s not Father Ted, but I haven’t seen religion mocked as warmly as this for years. It will probably evoke complaints from some quarters, but there is no nastiness here.”
Carol Midgley, The Times

“Simon Bird has previously starred in two hit sitcoms — The Inbetweeners, about a gang of misfits at school, and Friday Night Dinner, a wickedly sharp send-up of family foibles and eccentricities. Everyone Else Burns won’t be his third hit. It doesn’t work, because no one will feel even grudging affection for a control freak who rouses his children in the early hours to practise for the Apocalypse, or punishes his daughter for asking to have a mobile phone.”
Christopher Stevens, Daily Mail

“If you watched How the Holocaust Began last night, a devastating but brilliant account of the chaotic, improvised origins of Hitler’s genocide in eastern Europe, it’s likely you didn’t sleep very well. Every single detail was horrific, obviously, but the account of the experimental killing site in a Polish forest, set up to establish more efficient ways to murder en masse without ‘traumatising’ Nazi soldiers too much, showed that, even now, the Nazis can still surprise you with their evil.”
Carol Midgley, The Times

“Hitler’s Einsatzgruppen death squads carried out many of these murders. But the chilling truth presented here was that they did not – in fact, could not – act alone. They needed not just the tacit support of the civilian population, but their active participation. It is crucial that we understand how the Holocaust was able to develop; blaming it all on the Nazis is to turn a blind eye to the darker side of human nature.”
Anita Singh, The Telegraph

“James Bulgin’s account placed too little emphasis on earlier mass murders in German mental institutions, where SS death squads were first trained in wholesale killing, before war was declared on the Soviet Union. Bulgin touched on this right at the end, showing a gas chamber built to slaughter the mentally disabled — those the Nazis called ‘life unworthy of life’. They deserved more than a single minute of his attention.”
Christopher Stevens, Daily Mail