Give HBO’s latest drama six hours of your time, and it’ll tell you the story of the 21st century. That’s the promise made by “Years and Years,” which airs on the cable…
That’s the promise made by “,” which airs on the cabler starting June 24 after a run on BBC One in the United Kingdom. The first episode begins in May 2019, and subsequent installments push deep into the 2020s, far enough to reveal that our future history looks less like an arc towards progress than a whirlpool of entropy.
But politics have an inelegant way of clomping into the forefront of lives, at least in this moment and the moments “Years and Years” predicts ahead. Daniel, married and stable, falls in love with a Ukrainian refugee fleeing homophobic torture; Edith, protesting at an artificial island constructed by the Chinese, is caught in a nuclear strike that threatens to significantly shorten her lifespan.
Nearly every element, here, is conveyed with verve and imagination; though “Years and Years” isn’t sci-fi, for instance, the particulars of young Bethany becoming a piece of living tech made my skin crawl with their viscerality. Rook, the politician, is played by Thompson with a grim and clipped Northern English accent and with an ebullient willingness to say whatever will keep the camera light on.
And Russell T. Davies’s writing here is consistently elegant and, better, resonant. The key question of our times, one so massive that it demands to be broken up into several smaller ones, is how the individual should or even can react to living through increasingly rapid change. TV has made a couple of previous attempts at it: There’s “Westworld” on, which operates in the realm of allegory to illuminate just how surreal we become even to ourselves as familiar reality slips away.
“Years and Years” does something different, something that it feels not illegitimate to rank against the work done by novels. That cross-media comparison has been overused for years now, but watching “Years and Years,” I was reminded not of other shows on the air but of recent novels by
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