Years and Years and Yesterday

Years and Years is an HBO TV series following a British family over the course of a decade or so starting in 2019.  It is science fiction, although many people won't think of it as such, and it is very good.

There's a mode of writing in science fiction that doesn't explain the (sometimes technological) details; it just dumps the reader into the middle of the world and forces them to figure it out. (Ian McDonald's Luna trilogy, which I am reading now, is a good example). That's how this show works, and it does it beautifully. Wired has this to say about it.

Television apocalypses tend to come with a bang—zombies, dragons, Revelations. With Years and Years, writer Russell T Davies is instead working down amid the whimpers. Except for one nuclear bomb, courtesy of President Trump in the last days of his second term, most of the show grapples with the day-to-day indignities of civilizational collapse. War in Eastern Europe sends Ukrainian refugees streaming into England, and a Lyons brother falls in love with one. A sister comes home from a life of globe-trotting political activism after having been exposed to the fallout from that nuke. That teenage daughter with the IRL filter-mask gets into a spot of trouble with an illicit Russian cybermodification surgery. When the eldest brother and his wife go downtown one morning to find out why their online bank account has been 404-not-found all night, they realize that the crowd they’ve been walking past is actually the line at the door of the bank branch. The economy is collapsing, the run on the bank started without them, and this is what the end will look like. That, maybe, is the best logline I could lob from my armchair at Years and Years: “This is what it’ll look like.”

If that sounds prosaic, I haven’t done it justice. Davies has unlocked a science fiction superpower here. At its core, the genre is a tool for building thought-experiment machines. Literary sci-fi has typically been better at building worlds-that-may-be and the texture and meaning of life there. For sure, television pulls it off too, sometimes. Twilight Zone, Black Mirror, and Star Trek at its best all used speculation to ask questions not about the future but about the present. As my colleague Clive Thompson wrote years ago: “Science fiction is the last great litera­ture of ideas.” That’s the game Years and Years is playing. But it doesn’t have the one-off, toe-dipping dilettantism of an anthology show or the faintly chilly perspective of the already perfect United Federation of Planets. Here’s a better logline, then: This is what it’ll feel like.

The show isn't perfect; I thought the resolution was a bit too pat for one thing, but it's still very good and one of the best SF TV shows I've seen in a long time. I'm amazed I haven't heard more about it.

Yesterday is a fun movie if you don't think about it too much. It's about a musicin who, through an unexplained event, ends up in up in timeline where the Beatles never existed. (Along with a few other things that I'll let you have fun noticing). So naturally, he makes a huge career singing Beatles songs. It's light entertainment and I couldn't take it seriously, but I did enjoy it. If you want to beat the afternoon heat in a cool movie theatre, you could do a lot worse.