The TV Series That Predicted a Second Trump Term
What "Years and Years" gets right, what it gets wrong, and why we need it anyway.
If you’re having anything like the week I’ve been having (and I hope, for your sake, that you aren’t), you have been oscillating between poring over every stray bit of news and analysis on the internet, and finding all of it indigestible, like a lavish meal served just after you finished gorging on an entire greasy pizza. In times of catastrophic change—and have no doubt that last Tuesday’s electoral result is one such moment, ushering out one vision of America and welcoming in a harsher, uglier replacement—journalism can never be enough to speak to us about our fears, our hopes, and the crushing reality of the moment.
In lieu of scanning the Times or Bluesky one more time, might I suggest turning your attention to an HBO limited series that begins with Donald Trump being re-elected as president of the United States? Before you begin to wonder about the astonishing production schedules of David Zaslav-era Max, know that Years and Years is actually not brand new at all. But like Ezra Pound’s famous definition of literature, good television is news that stays news.
On the brink of a second Trump term, it is worth noting the longstanding shyness on the part of storytellers to document what being an American in the age of Trump looks, feels, and sounds like. The news alert on your lockscreen that ushers in a fresh wave of dread; the politicians and fellow travelers who insist that you did not hear what you just heard, see what you just saw; the barrage of hateful and mystifying and circuitous language; the hate-filled rallies—we have seen surprisingly little of these reflected anywhere in film and television over the last few years, outside of news and late-night programming.
Years and Years, created by Russell T. Davies in 2019, begins with news of Trump’s re-election spilling across TV screens, and documents a future of nuclear attacks, anti-immigrant roundups, and the rise of a television personality turned Trumpian autocrat named Vivienne Rook (played with chilling glee by Emma Thompson) as it affects a single family in Britain.
Years and Years captures better than any other work of the last decade the sense of learned helplessness endemic to so many of us in the West, where we watch our countries degrade as we simultaneously attempt to carry on with our own private lives. The series is masterful at documenting the unexpected alliances and catastrophes of a shocking age dominated by a singular, appalling voice, like the leftist activist who cheers on Rook: “She’s ripping up democracy. I love it.”
Primarily, the series asks the question that many of us are wrestling with right now: How do we carry on when our world appears to have come unmoored? The Lyons family muddles through each day as best they can as the world fiddles, burns, and dissolves before their eyes. Politics is sometimes the dissonant background hum of their lives, and sometimes the blaring alarm warning them to get out now. Davies, who also created the superb AIDS-themed series It’s a Sin, is one of the great artists of the moment at illustrating the intersection of the personal and the political. We may think that we can hunker down and avoid the fallout of others’ catastrophic choices, but Years and Years is a profound reminder that this will always be an illusory answer.
If art is the devising of imaginary solutions to real problems, the resolution Years and Years provides for the rise of Vivienne Rook—and blustering, Trumpian nationalism as a whole—presciently anticipates Trump’s promised second-term mass deportation of millions of people, and yet even Davies’ imaginative fervor must retreat in the face of stark reality. Rook, now prime minister, has secretly detained asylum seekers in black-site camps scattered across the U.K., and when members of the Lyons family uncover the truth, they break into one of the camps and film the detainees’ abysmal living conditions. The live stream goes out on national television, an uproar ensues, and Rook must step down in disgrace.
This may have appeared, at the time of the series’ production, to be a line—of decency, of political calculation—that no Western leader in the 21st century could cross. And yet, for American viewers tuning in to Years and Years after a campaign structured around accusations of Haitians in Ohio eating people’s pets, the promise of dictatorship on Day 1, and the performative cruelty of Trump’s plans for mass deportation, it is hard not to feel a sense of déjà vu at this narrative twist, and a further gasp of hopelessness. We are worse than we can yet imagine.
Perhaps popular culture has been leery of approaching the Trump era because it knows that it lacks the imaginative audaciousness to match—or even approach—reality. Moreover, even workaday, just-the-facts realism could not help but feel hopelessly partisan. We haven't told these stories yet because our storytellers are still struggling to accept these changes to what had once felt like a stable world. The real world has paradoxically become too difficult for artists to imagine, too lurid—and too ludicrous—to dramatize.
Donald Trump will now be president again. We are poised to do it all over again, but bigger and fiercer and crueler. We need the realism of television willing to demand that we look at ourselves in the mirror and stop insisting that “This is not who we are.” It is also worth acknowledging that all such projects are doomed to failure, too. No one’s mind will be changed by the next Years and Years. But we need to make it, and watch it, anyway.
In the final episode of Years and Years, materfamilias Muriel (Anne Reid) turns away from her granddaughter to watch a baby-faced television presenter hysterically pander to the audience about his lack of political savvy, his mechanical bowtie spinning as he laughs manically. The show pauses for Muriel to deliver her final verdict on not only this potential successor to Vivienne Rook, but on Trump too: “Beware those men. The jokers and the tricksters and the clowns. They will laugh us into hell.” Here we are now, in hell. We had been warned.
I hadn't heard of this show - thanks so much for shining a light on it!