The Scariest Thing about HBO’s ‘Years and Years’ is How Little Actually Changes

The six-part HBO/BBC miniseries Years and Years has inaugurated a new kind of predictive storytelling. Rather than flinging its audience 50 or 100 years forward, the pilot begins in 2019 and ends in 2024. Each episode thereafter clicks one year ahead. But in this near future, viewers might be surprised to find that not much actually changes. At the start of the series, Trump is still President, everyone is still glued to his or her iPhone, and bureaucratic waiting rooms are still embellished with “Vaping Prohibited” signs. And yet, it is only with the contextualization of all these things that we find familiar – Trump, the iPhone, a Juul – that Years and Years succeeds in really freaking us out.

Unlike other shows of this genre, there is no one dramatic event, no apocalypse to point to on which the whole plot hinges (even the similarly dystopian Black Mirror, to which Years and Years has been compared, generally rests on a singular, integral change per episode). Instead, Years and Years is the story of an ordinary, albeit diverse, multi-generational British family, the Lyons, living in a world that looks mostly like our own. And while the political, economic, and technological climate does have obvious transformations over the course of the series, it all happens so slowly that the Lyons hardly seem to realize the gravity of what’s occurring to their world. But we have something they don’t: perspective.

To us, this seems a horrifying future, but not in the way that zombies, killer robots, or cataclysmic natural disasters may frighten us. The portrayal of our future in Years and Years is terrifying precisely because it’s too close for comfort. It is almost impossible to distance oneself from the action on screen or to sincerely cling to the age-old adage, “well that will never happen to me.” Because the reality is that we can easily see ourselves in this future and in this family, a hodgepodge group of individuals not dissimilar to those we watch on shows like This is Us or Modern Family.

Take technological change, for instance. The most “future-forward” character is Bethany (Lydia West), the eldest daughter of banker Stephen Lyons (Rory Kinnear) and successful accountant Celeste Bisme-Lyons (T’Nia Miller). Early on in the series, Bethany tells her parents that she is transhuman, a new identifier that means she desires to be digital, rather than flesh. She moves closer and closer to this transformation, beginning with having a phone implanted in her hand. But Bethany is not the mainstream; she is still at the cusp. The show’s world, especially in the first four episodes, does not have as many jaw-dropping differences in tech as you’d think. Many computers look chunkier than the MacBook Air and there seems to be no progression in the iPhone. Likewise, at one point in the third episode, one of the characters has to log on to a different WiFi network because of a spotty connection. (The future has dead zones too, unfortunately).

And then, of course, there is the political meltdown that spans the course of the series, beginning with Donald Trump dropping a nuclear bomb on China in his last few days in office and culminating in the celebrity turned Prime Minister, Vivienne Rook (Emma Thompson), advocating for the mass genocide of Britain’s refugees in concentration camps. But, again, the way the show presents this series of events is almost predictable. From the characters spouting one-liners like, “Do you remember years ago, we used to think the news was boring?” to an official taking all-too-familiar pictures of drowned refugees on a beach to a brash businessman asserting that the nuclear bomb Trump dropped on China years earlier was fake news. These thought processes and events are close enough to our own reality that we identify with and can recognize that the probability they may actually happen is fairly high.

A few minutes into every episode, breaking newscasts are intercut with the Lyons family’s daily lives, often discussing or dealing with what the talking heads just reported. At first, it seems crazy that the Lyons are almost casual about the whirlwind of history happening around them. But then we remember they are not so different from us. We also watch the news, see something terrifying, and then choose to get on with our lives.

Years and Years creator Russell T. Davies has put forth this horrifyingly familiar future in order to give us a gift of sorts. He is saying: this is where we are headed, and soon. And while he builds off of a long tradition of literature and popular entertainment, Davies has gone even further in redefining this genre precisely by changing so little about the Lyons’ world, by utilizing the dystopia more subtly than writers, filmmakers, and showrunners before. The truth is that most changes, like the ones happening to the Lyons family, like the ones happening to us, evolve over time. We don’t realize we’re the frog in a heating pot of water until it’s come to a boil. By making its world so close to our own, Years and Years achieves success in what it sets out to be: a warning that when it comes to dystopia, we may already be living in it.

Stream Years and Years on HBO Go and HBO Now