From Years and Years to Bird Box: why we turn to dystopian dramas in a crisis
In Years and Years, the six-part BBC drama series from the writer Russell T Davies that starts this week, Daniel (Russell Tovey) cradles his newborn nephew and says: “I don’t think I could have a kid in a world like this … Because if it’s this bad now, what’s it going to be like [for him] in 30 years’ time, 10 years, five years?”
It would be tempting to write Daniel off as a catastrophist except that, as the series shifts forward in time, he and his family are forced to navigate an increasingly divided country in which technology is wreaking havoc, the economy is collapsing and war in Europe is bringing record numbers of refugees to British shores. If you think we’ve got problems now, Davies seems to warn us, you ain’t seen nothing yet.
Years and Years is by no means the first UK drama to imagine an alarming future: The Guardians (1971), Survivors (1975) and Threads (1984) variously imagined a fascist takeover, a plague and full-blown nuclear catastrophe.
Netflix is currently awash with dystopian dramas – Bird Box, Altered Carbon, Colony and 3% – in which the world is crumbling and humans have gone feral to varying degrees. In these troubled times, such visions of the future can provide catharsis of sorts, though Davies’s drama is a rare example of television considering the current situation and showing us where we might realistically end up. Rather than depicting asteroids, contagions or aliens hijacking the human race, it offers a grimly believable reality in which the most difficult and divisive issues of today – the migrant crisis, technology and the environment – bring about gradual societal breakdown.
But is this really what we want as entertainment? Are we not traumatised enough by what we see on the news? Consider the wail that went up over Netflix’s Our Planet, David Attenborough’s nature documentary that showed walruses crowding on to a toosmall stretch of land as an alternative to the shrinking sea ice, and then plunging off cliff edges to their deaths. Clearly there is only so much reality an audience can take.
In the US, psychologists and therapists reported a surge in clients citing the political climate as a cause of anxiety in 2016, dubbing the condition “post-election stress disorder”. A week after the Brexit referendum, the psychotherapist Susie Orbach wrote about clients who experienced the vote as “an assault on senses of self, of identity and community that people didn’t know they carried inside of them”. It’s no wonder that so many of us look upon television as a means of escape. We want to be taken somewhere else entirely.
And yet some of the best drama of recent years has come about as a response to recent events. The first series of The Handmaid’s Tale, based on Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel about a society in which women are subjugated, raped and killed by men, captured a moment in time, arriving shortly after a dangerous misogynist became the leader of the free world. The best of Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror series picked at the threads of technological progress to show the human cost.
At the gentler end of the spectrum, two British comedy series have lately depicted the repercussions of the refugee crisis: in Channel 4’s Home, a suburban family return from their French holiday to find a Syrian man hiding in their car boot, while in Don’t Forget the Driver, Toby Jones’s coach driver is startled to find a migrant stowaway in the luggage hold. These stories tell us as much about humans and their capacity for compassion as any CGI-smothered depiction of the apocalypse.
Omar El Akkad, the author of the 2017 dystopian novel American War, set in a future ravaged by climate change, told the New York Times: “I suspect the appetite for dystopian fiction reaches its peak not when things are at their worst, but when it looks like they’re headed there.” He’s got a point, although that could be because when the end of days arrives, we’re less likely to be dashing off scripts about it than murdering our neighbours over a tin of Spam.
Right now, it’s hard to think of a more prescient film than the 2006 thriller Children of Men with its depiction of environmental catastrophe and xenophobia; call me naive but not in a million years did I think we’d get so close to Alfonso Cuarón’s vision. Great art is supposed to reflect life, or so we are told. For me, the power of Years and Years lies not in its moments of high drama but in its more subtle drawing of the growing tensions between families, generations and cultures, and the line the series draws between now and the years to come. The future is here on TV, but the question is: have we got the stomach for it?
• Fiona Sturges is an arts writer specialising in books, music, podcasting and TV