Years and Years

[SPOILER ALERT] There are (mini)series that struggle with not having enough material to fill their full running time, so they sometimes force us to meditate over often completely unnecessary scenes that don't move the plot anywhere. And then there's Years and Years, which would love to tell the story of EVERYTHING and EVERYONE and from every angle and with overlap, ideally becoming the most relevant contemporary work on the globe, next to which Black Mirror would look like a shrunken aborigine head. Except that it doesn't have the space, budget, or energy to do so. And in general, I think it's mostly a matter of the creators' egos to take the whole thing so grandly. This is how the series rubs up against populism, conservatism, nationalism, media ownership, transhumanism, migratory waves, the climate crisis, terrorism, globalized banks, the disembodiment of the state-citizen relationship, activist burnout, pan-European instability, the need for segregation, deep-fakes, and dozens of other contemporary themes, only to end with a shot from a rocket launcher and a van driving through a fence. Indeed, as the series draws to a close, its cluelessness and distractibility comes more and more to the surface, making major changes happen suddenly and at the snap of a finger, because it no longer has time to show what led up to them, so it mostly explains them retroactively and after the fact, adding to their effect with incredibly cheesy, kitschy-as-hell epic music that sounds like samples stolen from Nightwish. The thick and fast production process is then implied by the apparent cheapness and sloppiness of both the depiction of the near-future world and the direction, but this can’t be excused by the low budget if you consider, for example, the previous year’s Hungarian Jupiter’s Moon and its ability to depict a confused and chaotic Europe. I appreciate the well-written characters of the bourgeois idiots (if Rory Kinnear ever plays a character you don't want to beat into the ground, give me a call), I appreciate a few of the screenwriting touches (Vivienne Rook's monologue suggesting she's not the driving force behind the plot, or the election scene where a black gay woman votes Tory and then her newly married husband votes Labour, because the bank has disappeared with his money, and their sister who has spent her life in human rights activism of course doesn't vote at all), but it all falls flat with a funny conclusion à la young adult conspiracy movies where everything seems to change as the heroes hack all the TVs in the world with footage of refugees behind fences in detention centers. Which I guess changed England. I'd just like to point out that people have been watching footage of refugees behind fences in detention centers for four years instead of commercials, and if that doesn't move anyone, that's the better option. (08.08.2019)

The British miniseries Years and Years lets viewers peer into the near future through the dramatic fates of the extended Lyons family, and the view is not at all pleasant. Everything seems so realistic and sometimes even scary that I was absolutely swept away and devoured the story like a madwoman. Russell T. Davies truly put a lot of effort into the multi-layered screenplay, meticulously crafting it down to the smallest details. Each episode is literally packed with information, clever ideas, and plot twists. Although I've known it for a long time, the central idea of the whole series deeply resonated with me, that we are responsible for everything that awaits us and our world, whether it happens or not. The vision that if we do nothing about the weather we will be forced to live in shelters at some point in the future is unfortunately not far from the truth. The final loving conclusion accompanied by ethereally beautiful music moved me to tears after all the emotionally tense scenes. (95%) (06.07.2021)