Family drama, global dynamics
Russell T. Davies’ ‘Years and Years’ series asks ‘what if’ and goes beyond
Spoiler alert: Do not read if you have not yet watched the first episode of “Years and Years.”
Russell T. Davies’ “Years and Years” begins with the members of a seemingly average family in the U.K. being drawn into a televised interview with entrepreneur Vivenne Rook (played by Emma Thompson) who admits she doesn’t care about parts of the world such as Kiev or Yemen. Her words are obviously polarizing, but so is her passion: Some of the family members like the unabashed honesty, while others recognize how dangerous her viewpoints, if they had power behind them, would become. Although the show is set across the pond and debuted there first, it is a tale that has become all-too-familiar to U.S. citizens.
“We’ve always had so much in common with America — the same language, the same culture. We’ve absorbed so much of your culture here with the food and television and cinema, and that’s the joy. And yet now we find ourselves in an extraordinary situation of being cowed with fear in regards to that country. It’s really, really strange,” Davies tells Variety.
As the title implies, the six-episode series spans decades to showcase not only Rook’s rise to power as a politician and the damage her policies cause, but also the trials and tribulations of the Lyons family, some caused by those greater policies and some that are caused by simpler tests of time and relationships.
Here, Davies talks with Variety about structuring the show to start in our present day and flash into a potential future. The following is an edited transcript.
Q: Where did you start with a story like “Years and Years”? Did the desire to write a multiyear spanning family drama come first, or were you more interested in looking at a global evolution and then decided it would be best to center that on a family?
A: I wanted for many years to write a drama about our civilization sliding — even before it began to slide. It’s been in my head for many, many years. And lo and behold, what we’ve seen for the past five or six or seven or eight years has been quite astonishing. There are many ways you can tell that story, but over time — over very many years — I realized the key to telling that story was through a family. You could write versions of this in which you are in the White House, in which you’re in China. “Winds of War” was a saga taking place over many years and saw the span of geography, as well as history. That’s one version; I didn’t want to do that. I wanted to seed it with something we all recognize: a family. We’re all from a family, even an invented family. And recently my niece had her 23rd birthday and we looked back at her 21st birthday — only two years ago — and you think of a family as a very solid, fixed thing, but in looking back only two years, in a photo of 12 people, one had died, one had divorced, one had been banished — I did the banishing. But in two years, in a very stable family, look what happened. So you get that realization that a family is a great arena for all the emotions and all the births, deaths, marriages — all those stories. It is trying to tell stories of seismic changes in society, but actually the family is a constant. This family can still turn up at Grandmother’s for dinner, for her birthday, for a barbecue. There is a consistency to it, and so I thought it just felt like a good way to experience a passage of time.
Q: How did you determine how often you wanted to see Vivienne Rook in the story, given that she is not a member of the family but her actions have such a great impact on their lives?
A: When you cast Emma Thompson, you want her to be in every scene! It was really tempting to rewrite everything and make her their long-lost sister. But I had to take a deep breath and say, “How often does anyone meet the prime minister or the president?” Part of the point is, you experience people through television; you experience her public image and the lies she’s telling you and the truth she’s telling you. She lives in the media. So it’s very important, in certain moments, you don’t see the real person. … I had to ration it. In the end, it’s not about the home life of Vivienne Rook. You don’t go home with her; you don’t meet her husband; you don’t see moments where she might gloat or she might weep. She very much is a public figure, because that’s how our life is: That’s how we’re experiencing Trump or Brexit or the new prime minister on the way, and God knows what madness we’re going to fall into, but that’s the modern world.
Q: Did you model Rook’s personality or policies specifically after anyone from U.K. politics or Donald Trump?
A: I think we’re 99% certain to see Boris Johnson as prime minister and he does in this country exactly what Viv Rook does: He spent many years appearing on panel shows on television, on comedy shows, and saying outrageous things to get a laugh. There’s Nigel Farage over here, too. The truth about Vivienne Rook, though, is we could all point to Trump or we could all point to Boris Johnson, but actually, and the point of this gets revealed in the last episode, is she’s all of us. When too many of us reach for that hostile decision, that simple racism, that simple exclusion of the other, that cheap line that’s who we become.
Q: The show starts in the present but then moves into a near future. How did you decide what and how many years you wanted to explore?
A: I actually toyed with a third term for Trump and I looked into the laws that are currently in place to stop that from happening, and I thought that could be going too far. But actually, “The Good Fight” beat me to it. I love that show — I think it’s absolutely brilliant — and they started a dialogue about what if he changed the law to have a third term. As a British person, I didn’t have the nerve to do that, but I love the fact that Americans went in that direction.
Q: Having seen such reactions from the U.K. audience, do you feel inspired to return to the world of the show beyond the six episodes you always intended this story to be?
A: No, I knew I had six hours, and I put everything I had into six hours. If they drove to my house with a truck of gold to do more episodes, I would just say no. I’ve moved on, and I am working on a new job for next year. And we only got that cast because they came onboard for six episodes with none of them optioned right from the start. That’s how we got them, to be honest. Each one of them — Rory (Kinnear), Russell (Tovey), Jessica (Hynes) — they could all lead shows in their own rights, so to get all of them on the same show was extraordinary, but that was all because they came onboard just to do six episodes.
“Years and Years” airs Mondays at 9 p.m. on HBO.