Only recently available in Italy, the television series Years and Years (2019) has captivated both British critics and audiences. Ruth Madeley, one of its lead actors, is an actress with spina bifida who plays Rosie, a single mother living with the same condition. On screen, however, this disability remains almost invisible—not the narrative's focal point, and certainly not an occasion for sentimentality. It is simply a fact about the character, woven into her family story as naturally as any other detail. The role of Rosie was not originally written to include a disability, but showrunner Russell T. Davies reconsidered after seeing Ruth's audition, and together they reimagined the character. A joint production of the British BBC and American HBO, Years and Years is a six-episode family epic spanning nearly fifteen years, following the Lyons siblings and their children as they navigate social, political, and technological upheaval in contemporary England.
Grandmother Muriel anchors the family. Four grandchildren orbit her: Rosie, a single mother who works in a school cafeteria; Daniel, a refugee-camp worker on the eve of marrying his partner Ralph; Stephen, a wealthy businessman with a wife and two daughters; and Edith, an activist who has stayed away from home for years. The story ignites on a 2019 evening when a new political figure appears on television: Vivienne Rook, whose brash directness propels her into an unlikely meteoric rise. From there, the series hurtles forward through years, painting a vision of Britain that mirrors our own world but darkened by dystopian and nihilistic tones. Another British series, Black Mirror, had already explored similar terrain—though focused solely on technology—and Years and Years shares its dry humor and deeply unsettling atmosphere.
The narrative pace is deliberately relentless, sweeping viewers through a cascade of events. Yet the series manages something harder: it draws characters we recognize instantly and takes us on a journey that is both emotional (as all good drama should be) and moral. In the final minutes, when Grandmother Muriel indicts her grandchildren, we feel the accusation land on ourselves. We recognize our own complicity, or at least our foreknowledge, of the self-destructive path our society seems determined to take—a world of horrors that makes us furious enough to complain about, but rarely angry enough to change.