Years and Years (Season 1)

Years and Years (2019) is a six-part BBC One drama you can watch online on iFILM, written by Russell T. Davies and directed by Simon Cellan Jones and Lisa Mulcahy. Emma Thompson plays Vivienne Rook, a blunt-speaking political provocateur whose rise to power frames the series; Rory Kinnear, Russell Tovey, Jessica Hynes and Ruth Madeley play members of the ordinary Lyon family whose lives unfold across fifteen turbulent years.

Starting in 2019 and lurching forward in time, the show tracks what happens to one Manchester family as the world shifts beneath them — automation eats jobs, a nuclear incident reshapes geopolitics, a son's Ukrainian partner faces detention, a granddaughter pursues body modification to its extreme, and the family matriarch, played by Anne Reid, tries to hold everyone together. Thompson's Rook is the engine of the political plot: a showwoman who says the unsayable and finds an audience hungry for exactly that.

Davies isn't writing satire so much as extrapolation — the world of Years and Years is recognisable precisely because it follows the logic of today just a little further than feels comfortable. The family drama is what makes it land. Stream all six episodes of Years and Years online on iFILM.