I don’t feel we deserve Russell T Davies. We don’t deserve his talent, his generosity, his glee, his unabashed joy in everything. And we don’t deserve his ceaseless willingness to pour them all out before us in endlessly glorious TV dramas, from his singlehanded resurrection of Doctor Who to Queer as Folk, last year’s magnificent A Very English Scandal – and now, Years and Years.
The HBO drama's last episode flies high, but amid soaring expectations and the stumbles along the way, can't quite stick the landing. The HBO drama's last episode flies high, but amid soaring. Review × Continue to. The dialogue provides opportunities for humor that could lighten the drama’s heavy load, but it’s rarely taken advantage of — or blown all the way out, so that it.
The new six-part drama on BBC One follows the fortunes of three generations of one Manchester family, the Lyons, from 2019 through to 2034. The intertwined personal lives of close-knit siblings Stephen (financial adviser and loving family man, played by Rory Kinnear); Daniel (Russell Tovey), a housing officer who realises his husband Ralph is not the man he should have married; Rosie (a fun-loving single mother, with none of the stereotyping that implies – she has spina bifida – played by Ruth Madeley); and political activist Edith (played by Jessica Hynes). Together with various offspring and their grandma Muriel (Anne Reid), it is all played out against a bleak backdrop that sketches out our (realistically) imagined future.
It comprises the aftermath of Brexit, a second term of Trump and the rise of China. And it sees the rise of a far-right populist party led by Vivienne Rook (Emma Thompson, having a whale of a time as a Farage-meets-Katie-Hopkins figure rendered more palatable by her no-nonsense, non-southern-elitist approach to life). As Daniel says: “I used to be bored by politics. Those were the days.”
A few years into the future and children wear “real” filters over their faces so that cartoon animals seem to sit at the dinner table, entry into a ring-fenced Kensington is means-tested, Gran reminisces about Woolworths and butterflies, and the new refugee crisis is building in Ukraine.
As ever, Davies seems to capture the zeitgeist effortlessly – fear and uncertainty hover over all the characters and you can sense their inner gimbals ceaselesslyrecalibrating, like ours, in search of a stability that never comes.
But the day-to-day minutiae of life go on as they must – and he aerates the heaviest, most fraught issues (from the insidious nature of tech, to income inequality, to the rapidity with which events can become both ancient history and rapidly repeated) with wit and optimism, so that they are no longer a burden, to us or the narrative, but grist to the mental and dramatic mill.
Stephen’s eldest daughter, for instance, comes out as “trans”. He and his wife Celeste dig deep into their progressive reserves, marshal their best attitudes and react positively – until she explains that she doesn’t mean transgender but transhuman. She wants her consciousness to be uploaded into the cloud, to discard her body and live for ever, digitally. Her parents’ reserves run dry.
Rosie’s first date with a new man, a single dad from school who has been deserted by his wife, takes a nosedive when she finds the – uh – attachment he keeps in his bedside drawer for Keith, the robot supposedly just there to help with household chores.
In other writers’ hands, this might be the moment for dispirited sighing and lesson-learning. In Davies’s hands, Rosie reacts as she actually would, getting straight on the phone to spread the word and laugh herself sick with her brothers. Having sex with anything called Keith becomes no less funny in the future than it is now.
Meanwhile, Daniel’s friendship with Viktor, one of the Ukrainian refugees in the camp he is helping to run, turns into an affair – when Ralph reveals himself as unexpectedly susceptible to the fake news and conspiracy theories swirling on the internet (or “thick”, as Daniel puts it, speaking surely for the current nation, as Ralph starts arguing against the existence of germs). They consummate their relationship on the night that sirens blare out all over Britain, as the US fires a nuclear missile at a disputed Chinese territory and the British prime minister announces that the country is on a war footing.
Aptly, for a series that compresses 15 years into six hours, the episode seems to pass in the blink of an eye, thanks to Davies’s trademark humour, compassion and the kinetic energy with which he infuses every project in which he is involved.
What a writer, what a craftsman, what a showman, all rolled into one. I’m telling you, we do not deserve him. But thank God he’s here.