I like RTD, he has a lot of heart and is one of Britain's better screenwriters. But Years and Years bites off more than it can digest. To be fair most dystopian tales start off slightly ridiculous and only get more absurd as reality goes in other directions. Orwell's 1984 might be the only one worth reading any distance in time from when it was written.

Some of the things in Y&Ys are frankly silly. More of it just doesn't make a lot of sense. Even more of it is stuff jammed in as sort of conceit. Two same sex couples, a disabled person, two interracial families, a body dysphoric, 3 broken marriages, two cancer deaths - I could go on, all in the same family... most of which has nothing to do with the core story. To be clear I have no issue with the responsible depiction of any of these things and I DO get why RTD thinks it important to include them. The problem is there is just too much here. It is unintentionally self parodying.

The net effect is a story that isn't well anchored in the narrative sense or in reality or even a plausible future. That the future never looks like we thought it would shouldn't deter this sort of speculative fiction, particularly when there are lessons to be learnt in the here and now; but it is hard to take away much that is useful from Y&Ys. That technology is a tool for good and evil is a banal point. That RTD thinks brexit, Trump and social media open a door to the death of democracy is equally banal. It might. And it might not. And if my aunt had balls she'd be my uncle. If one is going to speculate, at least provide something compelling to allow the fiction to come to life.

Perhaps this is to judge the show unfairly. So what if it isn't a chilling expose in how things turns to shite really quickly in the way the stunning miniseries A Very British Coup did 3 decades earlier? Does it work as a sort of Twilight Zone/Outer Limits/Black Mirror thing? No it doesn't. Those shows worked mostly, well at least the first two did, by novel ideas usually presented with some savage twists. There isn't much in Y&Ys that people don't already waffle on about all the time. So not much novelty. There are no twists. There is no irony. Instead we get sermons from key characters telling us how the world works. Call me old fashioned, but if a story has a moral, shouldn't the story itself reveal that moral? The Hare and the Tortoise has lived as a fable for millennia precisely because we are able to work out that the swift don't always win the race without anyone actually using those words.

This could, and should, have been so much better that it turned out. On a final note: Emma Thompson wins Ham of the Year.