HBO's Years and Years shouldn't work, but it uses modern toxicity to tell a harrowing but human story

The Hollywood Reporter

"There is a searing quality to HBO's latest series, the BBC One import Years and Years, a relentless and depressing though often funny and acutely smart take on the here and now of blind populism, Trumpism, technology and politics," says Tim Goodman. "With aggressive creativity, writer and creator Russell T Davies (A Very English Scandal, Doctor Who) manages to leap over three very difficult hurdles almost immediately — commenting on current events, tackling the horror of Donald Trump and including elements of technology paranoia that will draw knee-jerk comparisons to Black Mirror." Goodman adds: "The challenge in a series like Years and Years is not kicking out at the predictable backlash from Trumpers, climate deniers, racists and fascists — for numerous reasons they are not the target audience — but in taking what everybody else has been feeling in the past few years and turning it into compelling drama rather than a soap-box lecture. And that's what Davies gets most right most of the time, even when his rage — and it's his and everybody else's sense of outrage that he's tapping into — necessitates that he lean into themes that validate progressive, rational and empathetic concerns. He's preaching to the choir here — Years and Years very clearly being a WTF?! reaction to Trump and the American drift. But Davies has managed to package it in a wildly entertaining, moving and, yes, sometimes funny look at a world gone mad."

ALSO:

• The juxtaposition of the epic and mundane is the point: "This is a broad-strokes diagnosis of a species in existential crisis. It’s meant as a warning about what’s happening in the present moment."
• Nearly every element of Years and Years is conveyed with verve and imagination, with elegant and resonant writing
• Years and Years is Black Mirror with a heart: "Much as in Black Mirror, technology isn’t the enemy in Years and Years"
• It's an unsettling speculative saga of tomorrow, and the vigilance required to prevent the destruction of everything we hold dear
• Years And Years is like a limited-series-as-ant-farm: "It feels like it’s sadistically frying those ants under a magnifying glass"
• It's far more terrifying than any dystopian drama
• Years and Years is too obsessed with its premise to find the best means of delivering its message
• Creator Russell T Davies on making Years and Years: "I wanted for many years to write a drama about our civilization sliding — even before it began to slide. It’s been in my head for many, many years. And lo and behold, what we’ve seen for the past five or six or seven or eight years has been quite astonishing. There are many ways you can tell that story, but over time — over very many years — I realized the key to telling that story was through a family."