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A very DARK future

If a pop­ulist politi­cian says on tele­vi­sion at peak view­ing hours that he “doesn’t give a crap” about the Is­raeli-Pales­tin­ian cri­sis, we know what to ex­pect. And that is how the minis­eries Years and Years be­gins, six episodes co-pro­duced by the BBC and HBO ad­dress­ing the so­cial changes tak­ing place in the world, and in par­tic­u­lar in British so­ci­ety, from today until 2034. The se­ries be­gins in the pre­sent, but jumps to 2024 in the first episode, and then we have ap­prox­i­mately one year per episode until the last one, which jumps for­ward 15 years. Dur­ing this time, we fol­low the vi­cis­si­tudes of a fam­ily in Man­ches­ter — the Lyons — com­pris­ing grandma and four sib­lings with their re­spec­tive part­ners and chil­dren. We also fol­low the life of Vi­vianne Rook (Emma Thomp­son), a busi­ness­woman who en­ters the world of pol­i­tics with ex­trem­ist ideas and ends up as PM.

If in The Hand­maid’s Tale we saw such a sup­pos­edly ad­vanced so­ci­ety as the United States be­come an au­thor­i­ta­tive theoc­racy after a civil war, in Years and Years the de­press­ing evo­lu­tion of British so­ci­ety takes place grad­u­ally under the per­plexed gaze of the mem­bers of this more or less typ­i­cal fam­ily.

The po­lit­i­cal fu­ture de­picted in the se­ries is fright­en­ing pre­cisely be­cause we be­lieve it: Rus­sia in­vades Ukraine, China builds ar­ti­fi­cial is­lands for its mil­i­tary ac­tiv­i­ties, and Don­ald Trump wants to fin­ish his sec­ond term in style by launch­ing a nu­clear bomb at China.

Apart from the po­lit­i­cal is­sues, also con­cern­ing about this fu­ture is the use of new tech­nolo­gies and how they af­fect every­day life. The ul­ti­mate ex­pres­sion of how far it can go is when one of the Lyon grand­chil­dren an­nounces the de­ci­sion to be­come tran­shu­man by in­stalling their aware­ness in the cloud. This sto­ry­line has seen the se­ries com­pared with an­other fash­ion­able British se­ries, Black Mir­ror. How­ever, if in the lat­ter it is al­ways clear that we are talk­ing about sci­ence fic­tion, in Years and Years the most ter­ri­fy­ing thing is that the story is built on fa­mil­iar facts: po­lit­i­cal in­sta­bil­ity, fi­nan­cial cri­sis, cli­mate change flood­ing, and so on... As an anec­dote, not every­thing is bad: in 2027 Cat­alo­nia de­clares its in­de­pen­dence.

tv se­ries

YEARS AND YEARS Creator: Russell T Davies (who already broke the mould with Queer as Folk) Main actors: Emma Thompson, Rory Kinnear, Russell Tovey, Jessica Hynes, Ruth Madeley and Anne Reid.
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