Years and Years: HBO’s Dystopian Drama Stares Down the Future—Then Blinks

The World of Years and Years: Where the Future Goes Off the Rails

If you’ve ever looked at a news headline and wondered how much worse things could really get, Years and Years feels like it’s read your mind—and then written a feverish, panic-inducing diary from the frontlines of a falling society. This HBO/BBC co-production drops viewers into the fictional lives of the Lyons family as they weather an onslaught of disasters rippling out from 2019 all the way to 2034. At the heart of the storm is Vivienne Rook, a talk-show firebrand played by Emma Thompson, who rides British discontent straight to power while making Trump-era politics look almost quaint.

The show doesn’t flinch as it takes on everything from cyber warfare and the collapse of the pound to the normalization of detention camps for dissenters. Rook bulldozes political taboos—her TV rants and unapologetic scapegoating feel uncomfortably close to what’s already seeping into real political discourse. Watching her rise, the Lyons family’s quiet struggles—money woes, worries about online safety, generational divides—suddenly supercharge into threats that feel both fictional and eerily plausible. And as Muriel, the family’s matriarch, tries to keep everyone anchored, cracks start to show as the state veers off course.

The Final Reckoning: Redemption and Resistance

When the series finale lands, things are about as bleak as you’d expect. Stephen Lyons, once an ordinary public servant, is swept into Rook’s dirty machinery. After years of swallowing lies and hollowing out his own values, Stephen finds himself at a breaking point—literally. His suicide attempt, and the way his sister Celeste saves him, dials up the show’s emotional volume, making every choice feel loaded with moral weight. Then, in a gut-punch scene, Stephen turns on his boss, Woody, shooting him and leaking a cache of damning emails that lay bare exactly how far Rook’s regime will go to keep control. It’s enough for a national scandal, but not enough to topple the system.

That’s where Years and Years throws viewers a curveball. For all its edge-of-your-seat tension and dread, it stops short of full-blown dystopian collapse. Instead of wallowing in the darkness, the show offers glimpses of endurance through the Lyons siblings and especially Viktor, a queer character whose survival signals that not even the harshest regimes can snuff out the drive to fight back—or to love. Critics have picked this moment apart. Some love that the show refuses to slide into total despair; others wish it had the guts to leave viewers gasping in horror, rather than hoping for a better tomorrow.

What’s clear is that Years and Years isn’t just about the downward spiral. It’s obsessed with the question: what does it take to turn things around? The answer, according to creator Russell T. Davies, isn’t a lone hero—it’s a stubborn, loud, and messy collective of people who refuse to give up even as the world slips through their fingers. Whether that hope feels like a cop-out or the only sane form of protest, the show won’t let you look away from the choices that might shape your own future.