BBC's 'Years and Years': a prophetic pre-COVID TV show

The Beeb's dystopian family drama is an ideological pre-programming weapon aimed squarely at populism, human autonomy, and dissent.

We don’t watch much TV here at Collapse Life (apart from late night reruns of Seinfeld, which act as an effective sleep aid for us — an odd consequence of living in New York when it was a late-night staple on every channel).

But the recent reprise of our interview with Jennifer Bilek about our transhumanist future jogged our memory of a TV series that came out in 2019 on BBC. It was called Years and Years, and it was released about six months before the COVID pandemic was used to reshape the world as we know it.

Bilek’s interview specifically triggered one pivotal scene from the show, when a teenage girl sits her parents down and informs them she doesn’t feel like she belongs in her body and wants to become transhuman. Of course, that’s not the only dystopian storyline to emerge from the six episode series.

The show takes place between 2019 and 2034, following the lives of the Lyons family as they navigate a surreal and eerily plausible technocratic nightmare, dealing with myriad societal challenges: 80-day floods, blackouts, biometric IDs, bank collapses, unchecked migration, and transhumanism as par for the course. (Hmmm, tracks pretty close.)

But Collapse Life wouldn’t be the publication it is without an incisive critique: We challenge you to watch the trailer and tell us that Years and Years isn’t state-sponsored messaging masquerading as ‘sci-fi.’ The UK government has been known to work directly with media producers to shape public perception. Through what’s called "strategic communication," entertainment is often a delivery mechanism for policy messaging. So when the BBC releases a series like this one, it’s right to consider whether it’s not just entertainment but indoctrination.

Years and Years demonizes populist movements, sanitizes and legitimizes synthetic food, prepares the public for autocratic rule, and grooms unsuspecting viewers into passively accepting a future we should actually be fighting tooth and nail.

Manufacturing consent: likable characters and intersectionality out the wazoo

The Lyons family is lovable and almost impossibly diverse. You’ve got biracial couple Stephen (white) and Celeste (black) — who live in a posh London home with their two teenage daughters. Stephen’s sister Rosie is a single mom in a wheelchair, and their brother Daniel works for the Manchester council and is married to Ralph. Then there’s sister Edith, a globe-trotting hardcore activist, and iron-willed granny Muriel, the family matriarch. They’re normal, they’re sweet, they’re troubled — and they’re the perfect vehicle for smuggling dystopia into your living room.

Through their eyes, we watch the collapse of the old world and the rise of something new: self-driving cars, means-testing for access to city zones, breath scanning to verify identity, cashless payments, phones implanted under fingertips, AI that steals jobs, and the state fast-tracking gene editing surgeries, to say nothing of the ‘consciousness uploads.’ All this is presented with the emotional logic of ‘well, what else were we supposed to do?’

The answer, of course, is resist. But Years and Years has a different message.

Enter Vivienne Rook, a charismatic political outsider who says what everyone else is afraid to say. She curses on live TV, hates bankers, and promises to shake things up. For a while, it seems like she might actually represent the people.

When the government writes the script

But, since this is the BBC, she (of course) turns out to be an epic monster. As the series progresses, we learn she oversees secret concentration camps, crushes dissent, and disappears journalists. She is the show’s ultimate cautionary tale: ‘this is what happens when the masses fall for someone who tells them what they want to hear.’

The subtext couldn’t be clearer: populism is a stepping stone to authoritarianism. Anyone who tells you they will challenge the establishment is probably a future dictator. And if you vote for them, you’ll end up in a gulag.

Years and Years not only normalizes a future of digital slavery, it pathologizes resistance against it. From gene-editing fetuses to dissolving the dead in ‘aquatoriums,’ from 3D-printed houses to electric food made from zapped bacteria, every inch of the future is made to look sleek, clean, and rational. Even transhumanism is portrayed not as a violation of bodily autonomy, but as empowerment.

“We could be so much better than this,” says teenage Bethany, who dreams of being transhuman. “We could be free. We should be flying. We could be wavelengths in the air.”

When the government foots the bill for Bethany’s neural integration surgery, her father Stephen mournfully says, “Now the government owns my daughter…”

“But she’s happy," implores the girl’s mother.

And there’s the sales pitch: freedom is an illusion, and happiness is programmable.

The real horror is that you did nothing

In a highly manipulated emotional moment toward the end of the series, granny Muriel stares down her adult grandchildren and tells them the world we live in is of their own creation, because of capitalism and complacency:

We see a t-shirt that costs one pound and we think, ‘oh that's a bargain. I love that,’ and we buy it… And this shopkeeper gets 5 miserable pence for that t-shirt and some little peasant in a field gets paid 0.01 pence, and we think that's fine. All of us… We hand over our quid and we buy into that system for life.

I saw it all going wrong when it began in the supermarkets, when they replaced all the women on the till with those automated check outs… 20 years ago when they first popped up, did you walk out? Did you write letters of complaint? Did you shop elsewhere? No. You huffed and you puffed and you put up with it and now all those women are gone and we let it happen… So, yes. it's our fault. This is the world we built.

It’s the thesis of the whole show. The surveillance, the digital prisons, the erosion of rights — we allowed it. Through convenience. Through cowardice. Through complicity.

Populism is the danger and transhumanism is the escape.

But the real escape is knowing this: if they had to produce an entire series to convince you, it means you still have a choice. Question is: what are we going to do about it?

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