fifteen years of the future broken down into six episodes

France 2 – WEDNESDAY NOVEMBER 6 AT 10:45 P.M. – MINISERIES

While the Lyons, a seemingly united, diverse and inclusive family – as many current series like to reflect back to the viewer –, ritually celebrate the birthday of their ancestor, television, where one of their own speaks , announces live the attack of an atomic missile launched by the United States towards a Chinese island.

What will follow, over the course of the six episodes of Years and Yearsa British miniseries of anticipation whose course will span the second term of Donald Trump, is quite astonishing in the violence of the subject and the horrific predictions worthy of a more pessimistic than average Pythia.

Because the future imagined by Russell T. Davies (creator of Queer as Folk, Torchwood, It’s a Sinetc.) depicts, over the course of fifteen years, geopolitical and societal upheavals made up of nuclear and climatic disasters, bank failures and authoritarian political regimes (with the populist personified by Emma Thompson, a hybrid of Margaret Thatcher and of Donald Trump with a touch of Viktor Orban).

Mockumentary

In this era where morals have evolved, parents welcome with understanding the transition that their teenage daughter announces to them. Until they understand that it is not a question of a gender transition, but of one towards an augmented and digitized body (she has already had a telephone tool transplanted into her hand).

The migrant problem is embodied by the relationship of Daniel (Russell Tovey), one of the members of this family whose unity is going to crack, with Viktor (Maxim Baldry), a young Ukrainian in an illegal situation, forced by this Great -Post-Brexit Brittany to return to her native country – where her life is in danger. He will return, but at the cost of disastrous collateral damage, which constitutes a major dramatic shock during episode 4.

In 2019, during the first broadcast of Years and Years on Canal+, we noted that the alarmist message of this disaster and family series – which is as much This Is Usof Here and Now what of Black Mirror – sometimes bordered on caricature while avoiding ridicule, because it was treated in a mockumentary mode.

We then concluded by hoping that the chilling verisimilitude imagined by Russell T Davies would remain in the realm of nightmare. But, while France 2 is rebroadcasting it, and in view of recent disasters, wars and climate change, migratory flows and the possible re-election of Donald Trump, it is clear that the Briton was perhaps right.