Years and Years

“Years and Years” is a gripping, highly entertaining and beautifully written family drama first and foremost. The performances are extraordinary, and though Thompson toplines the cast (and does a brilliant job as an ignorant but charismatic candidate) the largest portion of the series' success rests on the strong work of the rest of the cast, with Madeley’s and Reid’s performances producing the most sparks.

He never loses sight of his characters, a[n] incredibly likable array of personalities. And what’s most impressive about this series is how deftly Davies uses the big issues of a world in tumult as backdrop for what is a basically a character piece. This is one of the best shows of the summer.

To its credit, “Years and Years” — among the most emotionally involving, and best, series to air so far this year — keeps its aperture narrow even as the world keeps forcing its way in. This is, above all, the story of a family, one whose ordinariness makes them a powerful vehicle for telling the future.

On top of the nuanced work from Davies and Jones, the six-part series boasts outstanding performances. Looking through the opposite end of the telescope at present (and controversial) history is often a recipe for disaster, but Years and Years is magnificently agile in the creativity it uses to make it all cohere.

Fear of the future informs every scene and every performance in “Years and Years,” a deeply disturbing yet absolutely riveting six-part British miniseries. ... Along the harrowing way, Davies is swerving ferociously from horror to humor to heartbreak to heartwarming, without ever losing his balance. And the magnificent cast goes right along with him, with particularly strong contributions by Kinnear, Reid and Thompson.

“Years and Years” is one of the best shows of 2019 so far — worth going back and experiencing it in your own way. While remaining a deeply absorbing family story, as good or better than any season of “This Is Us,” “Years and Years” is depressing on top of depressing. ... My praise for the show is not unqualified, however, as Davies (whose previous work includes the British version of “Queer as Folk” and a successful revamp of “Doctor Who”) stumbled greatly with Monday’s series finale.

With mordant wit and masterfully harrowing plotting, [series creator Russell T. Davies] puts the Lyons family through the emotional wringer, rendering the political all too personal. ... You will be riveted. [24 Jun - 7 Jul 2019, p.10]

What Davies has done, essentially, is combine a family soap opera with elements of "Black Mirror."

The six-part “Years and Years,” an often funny, often bleak, deeply unsettling look at our near future, follows the fortunes of the Lyons, a Manchester, England, family as they are rocked by the political and technological changes shaping the world. Imagine “This Is Us” crossed with “Black Mirror,” only with a slightly lower body count than the NBC sobfest.

Years and Years, then, is favoured by some wit, a cornucopia of fab talent and promising characters.

On rare occasions, the story can seem a little pat, a little too carefully arranged to make a point, and Murray Gold's score sometimes pounds in a little disconcertingly, like Wagner filtered through ABBA. But overall, "Years and Years" is organic and lifelike. The Lyons are believably a family, easy to care about and worry over. Davies has a talent for writing memorable speech — even speeches — that sounds at once rhythmically elegant, rhetorically eloquent and completely natural.

The anxious thrill of watching Years and Years comes not only from seeing the future unfurl in front of you, but also from watching how it ripples through the lives of this very modern, delightfully fractious family. ... Thompson is brilliantly menacing as Rook, communicating her absolute self-certainty, along with just enough ambiguity to make you wonder if power is everything she’s after.

The miniseries certainly has a sense of dystopia coursing through it, particularly when world events turn grim; but then the humanity of the characters and, in particular, their profound bonds buoy everything we see. I was surprised by how moved I was at times at the fates of the Lyonses.

Though it gets a bit ludicrous as it shoehorns nearly every family member into the heart of current events (in the manner of an old-fashioned epic historical soap like The Winds of War or North and South), it remains gripping. And when it’s firing on all cylinders, it plays like a fusion of This Is Us and Children of Men.

What makes this series effective is that not-too-distant horizon. It doesn't play out 50 years from now, but next year, then a few years after that, and then a few beyond that. Viewers can see the roadmap, and by always keeping them within the realm of the plausible, the ambient anger and confusion feels plausible, or familiar. ... A compelling — and timely — new series.

Though thoughtful and moving in its exploration of such suffering, both individual and collective, Years and Years occasionally stumbles by insufficiently using its characters to contextualize its political world-building. ... Perhaps the most significant aspect of Years and Years is the compassion with which it considers its characters.

There’s a lot of plot for six episodes. As a result, the Lyonses don’t always feel fully real. ... What grounds the series is a classic love story: the bond between Daniel (the always wonderful Russell Tovey) and Viktor (Maxim Baldry), a taboo attraction that deepens into something lasting.

At its best, which is often, this vision of tomorrow from Russell T. Davies—creator of the original Queer as Folk, and the showrunner who revitalized Doctor Who back in 2005—plays like a bracing “what if” scenario told from ground level. And if its balance of realism and out-there fantasy eventually falters, it remains an unsettling speculative saga of tomorrow, and the vigilance required to prevent the destruction of everything we hold dear.

Propulsive in its storytelling (thank goodness this is only a six-episode series, or hoo boy could it have gone off the rails), filled with terrifying montages of horrific prospective history (Mike Pence is president! All the butterflies are dead!), and featuring a super weird and largely unsuccessful blend of teens’ obsession with technology, “Years and Years” offers plenty of stimulus to keep you moving through it, but through four episodes, it’s too obsessed with its premise to find the best means of delivering its message.

At its best, Years And Years is like a limited-series-as-ant-farm; more frequently, however, it feels like it’s sadistically frying those ants under a magnifying glass.

Believable as a family and likable as individuals, the Lyons ground the show’s unwieldy themes in real lives viewers can actually care about. ... But the show too often feels like an exercise in liberal masochism. ... Its flaw lies not in the execution of its futuristic family drama but in the banal and occasionally pernicious ideas that form its foundation.

“Years” is very good at amplifying up today’s familiar sense of tumult. ... What it’s less good at, and this is important given the kitchen-table genre Davies has chosen, is making its characters into three-dimensional individuals. Mostly, they each feel like a representative for a social or political demographic.