Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Years And Years’ On HBO, Where A British Family Goes Through A Second Trump Term And Its Aftermath

The populist movement in much of the western world has been revolutionary, but not always in good ways. We have our heads buried in our phones as the world is changing for the worse around us, and we’re not doing much about it, because we’re worried with our own situations — our families, our jobs, our lives. Russell T. Davies has created a new miniseries that examines how deep down the populist rabbit hole we may go down in the next 15 years. Read on to find out more about Years And Years…

YEARS AND YEARS: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: A closeup of entrepreneur Vivienne Rook (Emma Thompson), on a TV show, saying “I just don’t understand the world anymore.”

The Gist: Listening to Rook on a Question Time show are the various members of the Lyons family, who live in Manchester. It’s September, 2019. Daniel (Russell Tovey) is watching with his boyfriend Ralph (Dino Fetscher), and his brother Stephen (Rory Kinnear) is watching with his wife, Celeste Bisme-Lyons (T’Nia Miller), and the seem to be talking to each other via the Alexa-type device (Senor) that’s in their homes. Their attention gets drawn to the TVs when, in response to a foreign policy question, responds “I don’t give a fuck about Israel and Palestine.” After the shocking statement, she says she just wants to make sure her recycling gets picked up.

Just then, Daniel and Stephen’s sister Rosie (Ruth Madeley) calls; she’s in labor and she and her son are being driven to the hospital in a ride-share car. He goes to the hospital to be with her, since the child’s father is back in China and their mother died not long ago. She names the boy Lincoln, which Stephen and his crotchety grandmother Muriel Deacon (Anne Reid) both agree is silly. Daniel holds Lincoln and worries what kind of world he’s been born in.

We fast forward to 2024. In those five years, Queen Elizabeth has died, Daniel and Ralph have gotten married, Muriel turns 90 and the family pays tribute to their sister Edith (Jessica Hynes), who continues to live in Vietnam mostly off the grid. Russia takes over the Ukraine, and political refugees stream into Manchester. Tensions between China and the U.S. escalate over an artificial island that might be a nuclear base. Oh, and Donald Trump gets elected to a second term as president.

In 2024, Stephen and Celeste have to deal with their older daughter, Bethany (Lydia West), wanting to be “transhuman”, i.e. she wants her brain downloaded to the cloud; Rosie has sex with a fellow school parent who has a weird fetish; Daniel, who works to relocate the refugees, starts to become disillusioned with Ralph, who is becoming increasingly susceptible to right-wing fake news, and starts falling for Viktor (Maxim Baldry), a Ukranian refugee. Vivienne Rook creates her own party, The Four Star Party, after being defeated in an MP election. Most of all, though, Edith gets in touch with them and warns them that the dispute over the island has touched off a nuclear strike… which is when the sirens go off during Muriel’s birthday dinner.

Our Take: Years and Years takes a look at what happens in the world during a second Trump term, and its aftermath. But we see it from the British perspective, via the Lyons family in Manchester. Why give the British perspective? Because the two countries have such a close relationship, and seem to be going down parallel populist paths (The U.S. with Trump, the UK with Brexit), creator Russell T. Davies (Queer As Folk, Doctor Who, A Very English Scandal) wanted to show how intertwined the two countries’ fortunes are.

It’s also interesting that Davies decided to show the UK going down an even deeper populist rabbit hole in the person of Vivienne Rook, who seems like an intelligent businessperson who will likely rope in various members of the Lyons family — as well as much of the working class in the UK — with her policies about immigration, jobs and other close-to-home topics. Of course, Thompson plays her perfectly, because Vivienne’s bluntness comes so naturally to her.

But the show is more about the Lyons family than Vivienne, and how the dumbing-down of Western society via technology affects them. “We went to the very edge of the solar system, built the Hadron Collider and the internet,” Stephen laments to Daniel, ironically, via smartphone. “We painted all those paintings and wrote all those great songs, and then… pop. Whatever we had, we punctured it. Now it’s all collapsing.” Great dialogue like that points out how far south things have gotten to this point… but how much further we have to fall as a species.

Davies is an expert at character-driven drama and tension, and the first episode sparkles as the nuclear attack on the island in the Pacific goes down, and the Lyons express so much confusion at the emergency broadcast from the government. Cut in with Daniel deciding to just go with his heart makes for a thrilling gateway to the rest of the miniseries, as we make our way to 2034.

Sex and Skin: Rosie is about to have sex with the dad from her kids’ school; she reaches for a condom and sees a pipe in his drawer; considering the robot (Kenny) she saw in his pantry earlier, that pipe did not bode well for the future of their relationship. We also see Daniel and Viktor having “end of the world” sex in Viktor’s temporary shipping container home.

Parting Shot: As chaos reigns in the Lyons family after the nuclear attack, Rosie screams, “What happens now? What happens now!?”

Sleeper Star: Lydia West is fantastic as Bethany Bisme-Lyons, who hides behind Snapchat-style filter masks that are projected on her face via a headset, then is convinced that she should be data instead of flesh and blood.

Most Pilot-y Line: Muriel: “A bit odd for Daniel… Childbirth with his own sister. If he wasn’t gay before, he will be now.”

Our Call: STREAM IT. Parts of Years And Years are exhilarating, while others are crushingly depressing. But it’s a fascinating watch either way.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, VanityFair.com, Playboy.com, Fast Company’s Co.Create and elsewhere.

Stream Years And Years on HBO