“Years and Years”: The Age of Anger and Sad Passions as Speculative Fiction

Abstract

Years and Years is a speculative fiction in the form of a family drama. Following the lives of the Lyons, the six-part series takes place in the post Brexit England between 2019 and 2034. Fifteen years during which, while the family, tossed among economic instability and technological upheavals, faces a series of disparaging crises, on the whole Britain witnesses the quick deterioration of social hold, within an increasingly riotous global scene. This article introduces the relationship between speculative fiction and the Deleuzian notion of the sad passions to successively analyse the miniseries addressing three separate scenarios: technological, political and ethical. Through each of them the author of this experiment in social science fiction, the well-known Russell T. Davies, draws a chilling, collective descent into a universe of rage and chaos, a sort of generalized and accelerated Age of Anger (Mishra 2017). Positing the thorny question of individual accountability, Years and Years interrogates the cumulative effect of repeated single acts of indifference and intolerance and everyone’s shared complicity in the collapse of our worn out democracies.