Years and Years is the brainchild of Russell T. Davies, who's well-known in Britain for his smart resurrection of Dr. Who in 2005 and his landmark series Queer as Folk. Here, Davies is less interested in inventing an imaginary dystopia than in taking the world we now inhabit—with Brexit, refugees, Putin, Siri, etc.—and spinning a vision of how things will play out in daily life. As huge and terrifying things happen, fortunes crumble and rise, love affairs flower for good and ill and young people embrace transhumanism—while some of their elders meet death.

The whooshing cultural changes—and the family's plucky adjustments to them—make Years and Years addictive, doubly so as the show boasts one of those crack British casts so well trained in realism. The actors keep the dizziest events anchored in common experience, and Davies is brilliant at finding real emotion in fanciful circumstances.

Lydia West (left) and Jade Alleyne play Bisme-Lyons sisters Bethany and Ruby. (Robert Ludovic/HBO)

Of course, depictions of the future often prove to be profoundly wrong, as those still waiting for their flying cars can attest. Indeed, speculative fiction usually tells us more about the present than the future. That's true here. Despite some witty doodles around the margins, Davies' dire sense of the next few years isn't exactly revelatory. He basically extrapolates from today's big issues, be it refugees, fervent nationalism, fake news, or the collapse of traditional political parties. At times, Davies falls into what George Orwell called the trap of believing that what's happening now will keep happening forever.

Steeped in liberal paranoia, Years and Years skillfully captures how the world now feels to folks like Davies who voted against Brexit, fear Donald Trump, and dread that the tolerant, democratic, globalized social order of the late 20^th century is collapsing around them. But whether or not you share Davies's politics, you will almost certainly find the show chilling and identify with the Lyons family's struggles to understand, and survive, forces they can't begin to control.

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