Everything Happened, Nobody Decided

On 5 October 2022, Liz Truss walked on stage at the Conservative party conference in a Karen Millen dress with puffed sleeves. People soon noticed that it was the same dress Emma Thompson wears as Vivienne Rook, the populist prime minister in Years and Years. Russell T Davies posted the two pictures side by side on Instagram with a four-word caption: "This is getting weird."

It wasn't a tribute. Truss had worn the dress at an event back in 2019. But that's how Years and Years has been living since it aired. It keeps being right about things by accident, because Davies was paying attention to the present.

The series ran in six hour-long episodes on BBC One from May 2019, then on HBO that June. It follows one Manchester family, the Lyons, from 2019 to 2034. There's Stephen (Rory Kinnear), a financial adviser; his wife Celeste (T'Nia Miller); Daniel (Russell Tovey), a housing officer; Rosie (Ruth Madeley), a single mother with spina bifida who works in a school canteen; Edith (Jessica Hynes), an activist who's always somewhere dangerous; and their grandmother Muriel (Anne Reid), who presides over the lot of them from a crumbling house. In the background, and sometimes the foreground, is Rook. She's a businesswoman who swears on Question Time about Israel and Palestine and builds a party, the Four Star Party, named after the asterisks the broadcasters used to bleep her.

The art: the future arrives in the kitchen

The best decision Davies made was formal. Each episode jumps forward a year or more, and the big events reach the family the way they reach real families: through a phone notification, a radio left on in the next room, a row at a birthday party. A nuclear strike is something the Lyons hear about at Muriel's 92nd birthday. A bank collapse is a hole, overnight, where the money from a house sale used to be. That's what it felt like to live through the late 2010s and the 2020s: history as weather, always on, never quite your business until it suddenly is.

The cast makes it work. Kinnear plays Stephen as a decent man who becomes something worse when he loses his status, and you can watch the moment it happens. Tovey gets the show's biggest arc. Daniel leaves his husband for Viktor (Maxim Baldry), a gay Ukrainian refugee. Then he loses Viktor to deportation, follows him to Madrid, and drowns in the Channel in an overcrowded boat. That scene in the fourth episode is the best and hardest thing in the series, and it offers no comfort at all. Reid's Muriel is the comic engine and, by the end, the moral one. In the finale she gives her family a speech that one reviewer called "an articulate kick up our collective backside": a monologue saying the mess is everyone's fault, built from all the small daily choices that nobody thought counted.

Thompson is terrific and there isn't enough of her. Rook is mostly a face on a screen, which is the point, but it means the show's most frightening idea, that a celebrity can talk her way into power by saying the rude thing out loud, is sketched rather than shown working.

Davies's habits are on full display. He loves a speech, and the characters deliver them in the middle of family dinners. Bethany (Lydia West), the teenage daughter who declares herself transhuman and gets hand implants and later a brain implant, is the weakest strand. She's a walking idea about technology who keeps turning up when the plot needs a hacker. The last episode settles everything too tidily. Rosie drives her van through a curfew fence on live television, Rook is charged with murder over the "Erstwhile" camps, the BBC comes back on air and the family gathers round. After five hours of watching small decencies lose to big indifference, the show lets one van and a broadcast win. It's moving. It isn't believable. That's what keeps it at 7.6.

The prophecy: the forecast was the family

It's easy to make a list of what Years and Years got right, and the list is unnerving.

Trump comes back. The show gives Donald Trump a second term, then has him fire a nuclear missile at Hong Sha Dao, an artificial island China has built in disputed waters. The real second term began in January 2025, after a gap the show didn't predict, and nobody has fired a nuclear weapon. But China really has spent the years since 2013 dredging thousands of acres of new land out of the South China Sea. Davies didn't have to invent the island. He only had to imagine what someone might do to it.

Ukraine. In the show, a Russian-backed government takes over Ukraine, gay Ukrainians are persecuted, and refugees like Viktor end up in camps run by people like Daniel. In 2022 Russia invaded Ukraine in full, and millions of Ukrainians fled west, many of them to Britain under visa schemes created for them. Kyiv didn't fall, so the details are wrong. But in 2019, Ukrainian refugees were not an obvious thing to put in a Manchester family drama.

The bank. In the second episode an American bank collapses, the crisis spreads, and Stephen and Celeste lose the money from their house sale overnight. In March 2023 Silicon Valley Bank collapsed and panic did spread across the Atlantic. Then the states stepped in. Washington promised that every depositor would be made whole, and HSBC bought SVB's British arm within days. The show predicted the shock correctly but not the bailout, and the gap between the two is where most real lives happen.

The job. Celeste, an accountant, loses her job to AI in 2025. That's the forecast everyone now makes. The evidence so far is mixed. The IMF estimated in early 2024 that about 40 per cent of jobs worldwide were exposed to AI. A Yale Budget Lab study in October 2025 found no sign yet of a broad disruption to the labour market.

What Davies really predicted, though, wasn't any single event. It was the feeling of the 2020s. A disaster happens, then the next one happens before you've finished reacting to the first, and the main cost is exhaustion. The show is clear about who wins in that kind of country. People who have learned to stop paying attention leave room for someone like Rook to get her way. Muriel's speech makes the same point. In a country like that, nobody votes for the catastrophe. They just never get round to voting against it.

He missed some things. Rook's Britain turns authoritarian through Parliament and the camps, the old-fashioned way. The real drift of the 2020s has been less dramatic and harder to film: power moving to platforms, to feeds and to people who never stand for anything. And the show's transhumanism, for all of Bethany's screen time, turned out to be its most dated idea. The machines that actually changed family life in the 2020s were chatbots on phones. Nobody needed an implant in their eye.

The reading

Years and Years is a big-hearted, over-talkative, often brilliant family drama that went on to look like a documentary. Its prophecy is unusually good because it isn't really prophecy. Davies took the anxieties of 2019 seriously, gave them faces, and moved them a few years down the road. If he was right, he was right the way a good doctor is: he had read the symptoms. The show's best line of argument is also its saddest. In the Lyons' Britain, everything happened, and nobody decided.