"Years and Years" - BBC's answer to Black Mirror?

If that's what it's meant to be, it's a very pale comparison. I found this 6 episode mini-series hard to watch, with ridiculously stilted writing. It takes a very non-subtle approach to futurism, with awkward exposition of technology and societal changes.

I'm not sure if these failings were primarily due to aiming at a broader, older, BBC audience, or just harsh budget and time limitations. Its pacing dragged and felt rushed, in turn; totally unbelievable character behaviour in the opening episodes was blatantly there to move us between plot points.

The artistic value was bargain basement, in terms of the repeated, cacophonous drum music theme, like a mangling of the BBC news beats designed to be absolutely certain that the viewer should to terrified of the future. The culmination of the first episode bringing that to a cringingly awful crescendo, with the central family shouting incoherently at each other cut with pound land apocalypse scenes of asylum seekers rioting, or something, around a bonfire.

Which brings us to the actual main topic of the show - (illegal) immigrants and xenophobia. "Years and Years" is essentially a family drama smashed into the depressing main-stream news reporting of the last few years, dramatised in a semi-sterile BBC fashion, and sprinkled with hard lumps of cliche transhumanist tropes.

If sci-fi is valuable (in my opinion) for preparing society for major changes to it's norms, this series seems determined to prepare the UK for Farage as prime minister, via an unsubtle female equivalent character. It could be argued as a cautionary tale, but I think that (like all his press coverage) it's as much softening the blow, familiarising us.
I'm not sure it even manages to make the main asylum seeker character sympathetic. Failing to really make his motivations for fleeing seem that pressing or necessary. Perhaps aiming to depict someone more identifiable and middle class. It certainly wouldn't win over anyone unsympathetic to gay rights. (But that's would probably be asking a lot.)

What it achieves best is drilling home the idea that computer technology is going to make a lot of current jobs obsolete, including high paid work like accountancy. Simply heralding a uptick in the precarious 'gig economy' of little, badly paid grunt work. Again, more of a reflection of the present, with (of course) no mention of basic income, as a potential solution. Or anything positive, like new types of jobs or creative possibilities brought about by technology (e.g. we now already have pro gamer, streamers, content creators, etc).

Of course it failed to show self driving cars or any other new hardware exciting looking, in it's 10 year forwards scope. Budget, I guess. Kids with VR goggles on, as a norm.

Weirdly, there's a holographic face mask, like a Snapchat filter overlaid directly onto reality, the like of which appears only right at the beginning, less than 5 years from now. But nothing that magically advanced (and virtually impossible) is shown again. Such a technology would have very wide reaching uses, no doubt. That kind of thing we'd see crop up repeatedly in Charlie Brooker's imagined world (e.g. like the neural connection micro-dot devices, etc).

(Actually, it looks like this was more of a transparent, screen, than magical hologram.)

But I guess it was kind of a cool concept, that brings focus onto existing social trends (and societal neurosis about female appearance), that can seem a little bizarre and bewildering. No need to edit your visage in post-processing if/when you can cover (or manipulate) the appearance of your actual face in real time.

Harking back to its politics. It really is pretty depressing in *still* being determined to present the false dichotomy of options between the faux populist far right friendly fascist and the failing old parties. It shows the Green party (and Lib Dems) on a future ballot paper, but otherwise ignores them. Which seems short sighted - their support has been goring fairly exponentially, and it seems likely they might start making real breakthroughs in a couple of election cycles, between political and demographic factors.

Not to mention environmental factors - although it does have millions (in the UK) displaced by flooding, as a minor aside. With a news report montage talking of 60 days of rain, which seemed a little earily apt, given that it had been raining here every day for well over a week, when I watched this.

On the global scale it somewhat dances around Brexit and it's consequences (aside from the fact that leaving hasn't excused us from UN obligations to take Ukrainian asylum seekers). There's a two tier NHS for those with cash (the grandmother having spent the kid's inheritance fast-tracking on miraculous eye saving treatments), but no talk of private (American) companies buying it up. There's almost entirely myopic focus on the UK, miraculously independent of happenings encroaching from aboard.

Well, to be fair, there's another, worst, financial crisis, which at this point has been expected for so long it's kind of retro-futuristic. And an America nuclear strike on a Chinese military island, which causes a disproportionate panic, but comes to absolutely nothing. I guess that kind of big stuff is hard to predict, well. But it's pretty telling to fail to even touch on China becoming the unequivocal new global leader, in many ways. It already is, in some.

In the final episode there's some wishy-washy mind uploading, to save a dying protagonist. But no depiction of any wonders this might open up. It's actually heavy handed in declaiming the process as not capturing her real consciousness (I guess to try to appease more religious viewers..?).

(Christmas family meals through the years, to feel grounded and British...?)

More heavy handed, still, is it's ultimate concluding speech by the grandmother. (Incidentally, she's effectively the family matriarch, thanks to ownership of an overly big old house.) Apparently we're all to blame for everything that's gone wrong in the country, she self-righteously informs her descendants. I guess the point is ostensibly to not scapegoat immigrants or any other minorities. 

But in pointing the finger so democratically, it's insidiously absolving the ultra-rich and powerful of a massively disproportionate influence in our societal malignancies. No talk of extreme wealth inequality at all, not even tech giant CEOs. Which makes little sense, given that this inequality is still accelerating, unabated - these titans of fortune will be casting even more drastic shadows on the rest of us.

Finally, the concluding arrest of the fem-Farrage feels worryingly unrealistic; already we're at a point where police power seems to have been concentrated to the directorate (Downing Street) - there's been a 2 year hold-up of criminal investigations into referendum (and election) cheating by Leave.EU, etc. And very recently we've had the Met steering clear of PM to be, Johnson's, potential domestic abuse report and call-out.

When anything connected to the government is considered 'too political' for law enforcement to touch, it seems dubious that any amount of half arsed phone footage (from camps supposedly exterminating refugees, in the show) would have enough clout to effect a top level intervention. Unlikely that infiltration would even get that far, with close scrutiny and undercover police thoroughly infiltrating the most mainstream of activist organisations. The present already feels like it may be more hopeless, in some ways.