Russell T Davies’s incomparably brilliant six-part BBC/HBO miniseries Years and Years is a gifted work of humanist science fiction with a bold conceit at its beating heart. It dramatizes the rise of populist/nationalist dictator Viv Rook (Emma Thompson) but not with the typical “halls of power” focus on her growth from eccentric media darling to local member of Parliament to prime minister.

Instead, Davies audaciously gives his biggest name star at most 10 minutes of screen time over six hours. The series is not about the exact mechanics of how Viv takes over Britain. Instead, Years and Years is a family drama, rendered with warmth, wit, humanity, and genuine love for every character, no matter how awfully misguided they may sometimes be.

The series focuses on the four Lyons siblings, chronicling their lives in Manchester over 15 years. We follow affairs and lost jobs, bankruptcies and divorces – the events that feel momentous to them, just as our own lives seem like the most important things in the world to us.

Meanwhile, the political content remains mostly background noise, as it is for the vast majority of us, until it suddenly shows its power to control every aspect of their lives. Indeed, in these early episodes, Viv is seen almost entirely on TVs that characters may or may not be watching. It’s a masterstroke that sets this series apart.

Some may dub it a British Handmaid’s Tale or compare it to Black Mirror, but Years and Years is much more. Other dystopian dramas such as The Hunger Games and Children of Men drop us into a world where an awful normalcy is already well established, but it’s rare that a piece has the breadth of vision to start from a world that is recognizably our own and show a gradual, plausible, almost unnoticeable transition to tyranny.

Ralph (Dino Fetscher) and Daniel (Russell Tovey) exchange vows before the rest of the Lyons clan. (HBO)

As the series opens, we meet the thirty-something Lyons siblings. Middle-class brother Daniel (Russell Tovey) marries his boyfriend, only to find they aren’t as perfectly matched as he hoped. Wealthy Stephen (Rory Kinnear) lives in London with his family, including daughter Bethany (Lydia West) who is tormented by feelings that, we will soon learn, are far more than standard teen angst. Meanwhile, working-class sister Rosie (Ruth Madeley) gives birth to a child who will grow to quiet but beautiful adulthood over the course of the series.

Viv herself is introduced, appropriately enough, on TV, emerging from obscurity as one of many guests on a panel show. Her blurted response to a question about Israel and Palestine – that she doesn’t “give a f**k” about the issue – instantly makes Viv a star. She proceeds to say she only cares about the issues facing her in her own life, giving voice to everyday concerns in a vague, meaningless way and connecting her to a huge portion of the viewing audience.

Viv (Emma Thompson) appears on ‘Question Time’ as the series opens, and speaks her mind. (HBO)

As they watch, most of the Lyons family members react with disinterest or amusement. Only Daniel is perceptive enough to clock Viv’s true colors immediately, saying, “Oh my god, she’s a monster.”

The opening scenes are purposely set now. This was so important that Davies wrote into the script* that a radio broadcast Stephen listens to was to have that day’s news added at the very last minute, “dropped into the mix before transmission” in the UK. (The US version of the episode has news of President Trump’s border wall, but the original UK version, which aired seven weeks ago, reported on the death of actress Doris Day, who passed away just hours before the program was broadcast.) Davies grounds the series in a palpable sense of immediacy before it rockets off to its imagined future.

After we get our bearings, a brief but skillful musical montage takes us five years into the future, through a succession of New Year’s Eves, birthdays, life milestones, and world events ranging from the reelection of Donald Trump, to the deaths of Queen Elizabeth and Angela Merkel, to Viv’s defeat in her first local parliamentary election, after which Thompson says, “You just watch me, I’ll be back” with sudden, terrifying intensity.

In 2024, England finds itself dealing with an influx of Ukrainian refugees fleeing Russian annexation. As a housing officer for the local council, Daniel manages a makeshift camp constructed from cargo containers. He has a witty but pointed argument with a scornful nativist official about the definition of refugees versus immigrants, and the legal and moral obligation the UK has to help those facing death in their home countries.

At every turn, Davies finds ways to make the current political conversation come to life through organic, character-based dramatic conflict. Daniel soon finds himself instantly, undeniably attracted to one of the refugees, Viktor (Maxim Baldry), a sensitive young Ukrainian who fled Kiev after being tortured by the Russian-allied authorities for being gay. Baldry achingly conveys a sweet nature that hides a world of pain that can wash over his face in an instant.

Daniel (Russell Tovey) searches for Viktor among the refugees. (HBO)

Daniel is conflicted by his growing desire for Viktor, simultaneously realizing he may not want to spend the rest of his life with his husband, a man who seems to have no mental filter and eagerly believes conspiracy theories he reads online – from germs being a fraud perpetrated by the pharmaceutical industry to Earth possibly being flat.

“Our brains are devolving,” Daniel later complains to Stephen about his husband. Davies skillfully dramatizes the horrifying reality that as ever more information becomes available to people, they can choose to filter out all but the information they want to receive, no matter how distorted their intake becomes.

The gradually evolving future technology of Years and Years is brilliantly realized and subtly, organically integrated into the lives of the Lyons family. The devices on display in this first episode, set only five years out, have not yet evolved all that far from the familiar. The most notable is an ingeniously imagined mask that teenage daughter Bethany wears, allowing the user to project a hologram of the “face filters” of puppy dogs and baby faces that we routinely apply on Snapchat or Instagram today – only now Bethany can live behind the armor of this mask in the real world.

Bethany wears her “filter” while talking to her mom, Celeste (T’Nia Miller). (HBO)

It feels utterly plausible yet cleverly satirical at the same time, but it’s realized with total commitment to its grounded reality. One stunningly conceived shot allows us to see Bethany’s real face behind the mask, her eyes, unseen by her parents, awash with conflicting emotions that she hides with the ludicrous baby doll CG face they see.

We are also introduced to Signor, a small plastic neon-purple pillar that’s clearly a proxy for Siri and Alexa but which only really serves as a clunky device to ask factual trivia questions of at this point in the series. In addition, there’s a great little comic interlude where Rosie discovers one night, to her amusement, that her hookup has a rudimentary robotic butler, and then, to her horror, that the robot doubles as an automaton sex slave.

Rosie (Ruth Madeley) on her date with Tony (Noel Sullivan) before it goes horribly, hilariously wrong. (HBO)

Eventually, Bethany declares that she is a “transhuman,” confounding her parents, Stephen and Celeste (T’Nia Miller), who think she means she is transgender. No, she explains, she does not want to change sexes, she wants to have her consciousness uploaded into the cloud, transcending and dematerializing her corporeal form, which her horrified parents read as simply wanting to kill herself.

There is an unexpected genius to casting the beatific West as Bethany. It would have been easy to cast a sullen, dour actress as Bethany, but instead the show boldly casts a girl with the purest smile, whose gentle soul and open eyes draw us in. She seems absolutely joyful with the realization she has come to – that life can be so much more than the physical reality people around her see. It’s an audacious choice that would, at first glance, seem counterintuitive, but which ends up paying enormous dividends in episodes to come.

Viv Rook (Emma Thompson) launches The Four Star Party on national television. (HBO)

Also in 2024, Viv launches a political movement. She dubs it The Four Star Party, after the **** used by the print media to convey the curse word she uttered on the air so many years ago, but also to represent “four stars striving to be five,” as she puts it. Davies’s creation of Viv nails how populist, fear-mongering, wannabe dictators traffic in cheerful, optimistic platitudes – vague statements of wishing to simultaneously move their country ahead into a glorious future and back to a collectively imagined, perfect past.

As the first episode draws to its close, we find the Lyons family freezing outside, at the annual outdoor birthday bash for grandmother Muriel (Anne Reid). At last, we finally meet fourth sibling Edith (Jessica Hynes), a human rights campaigner who has been abroad for years fighting social injustices. The family connects with her over their phones by video, in Vietnam, just as news breaks of an American nuclear attack launched against a Chinese island military base by Donald Trump in his last days in office.

This final portion accomplishes what the equally brilliant 1984 British TV movie Threads did, showing how flashes of news broadcasts in the background can go unnoticed by characters living their lives in the foreground until it’s too late, and the events overtake them and devour their everyday lives.

The Lyons clan connects with Edith via FaceTime, just as their world is upended by the US nuclear attack on China. (L-R) Rosie (Ruth Madeley), Stephen (Rory Kinnear), Muriel (Anne Reid), Bethany (Lydia West), Celeste (T’Nia Miller), Ruby (Jade Alleyne), Daniel (Russell Tovey), Ralph (Dino Fetscher) (HBO)

When the horrifying new reality finally hits, as sirens begin wailing across Manchester, it’s one of the most chilling moments in film or TV in years – because of how hideously plausible it is. Indeed, the series has become sickeningly relevant in a way its makers could never have anticipated when it was filmed last fall – the first episode finds itself airing just days after a U.S. strike on Iran was reportedly avoided by minutes.

The nuclear attack on the other side of the planet, witnessed firsthand by Edith, is the first point at which Years and Years markedly diverges into a radically different reality, but it’s done with such absolute conviction that it takes us effortlessly along into this terrifying brave new world.

In the aftermath of the nuclear attack, all artifice is stripped from the characters and they become guided by their instincts. Daniel abandons his ill-matched husband for the arms of Viktor, who he has known since first glance is the love of his life. Meanwhile, while the others bicker and fight, Gran calmly prepares tea for everyone, maintaining the Keep Calm and Carry On/stiff upper lip mentality that is easily mocked but has seen Britain through adversity since time immemorial.

In the episodes to come, the Lyons family will have to bear tremendous hardship and pain, but there will also be incalculable joy and love to share.

Fran (Sharon Duncan-Brewster) tells a story to the Ukrainian refugees around a campfire. (HBO)

At one point in this episode, Daniel introduces himself to his neighbor Fran (Sharon Duncan-Brewster), who makes her living visiting schools and businesses as a storyteller. Fran explains that the kids love her because “stories help them to make sense of the world.” Davies has been one of Britain’s premiere TV storytellers for decades, and every moment of that has been progressing toward Years and Years. It is his magnum opus, a jewel he has gifted us with, at a time when its message is urgently needed.

*Davies and the BBC have kindly made his scripts for all six episodes available to fans of the show, free of charge, right here.