Years And Years

Sometimes watching TV can be torture.  Granted, it often comes with the accompanying sentiment that you could be doing something better with your time: connecting with family members, perhaps, or making a difference in your community by volunteering to help those in need.  Once you’ve quashed those feelings by persuading yourself that you’ve worked hard enough all week and you’re perfectly entitled to exist inertly on the sofa while images are beamed into your head for the purpose of entertainment though, it’s the content on that hypnotising and paralysing screen that can cause untold pain.  Whether it’s the bodies on Love Island that you will never have, or the bright young things who are already better than you on University Challenge, the sought-after escapism can sometimes give way to unavoidable introspection, leading to an analysis of your reality that makes you feel worse than you did when you popped the telly on.  Enter, then, Years And Years.

An evening peak drama of course has the artistic license to fabricate a world where things happen that are more interesting than daily life.  Downton Abbey mixed ye olde moral compass with the foibles of servant management.  Line Of Duty poses the question: what if all those coppers are bent?  Either way, they offer distance from our humdrum existences, making the characters’ often terrible experience seem exciting and diverting.  Conversely, Years And Years can only fill its audience with dread.  Its narrative device?  It’s set a little bit in the future.  Not quite the virtual reality-dominated future of Black Mirror where attaching little metallic discs to your temple is all you need to enter wholly into an alternative reality.  No, we’re talking a few months’ away.  Things that might happen next year, and the year after, and then, as a result, a few years after that as well.

Why would this be so terrifying?  Two things: not actually knowing what will happen and fearing that the worst-case scenario will win out over the best.  And it’s so near that it’s not a single future that’s been imagined and will affect subsequent generations.  It’s what we ourselves might have to go through as our lives progress.  2019 headlines veer from climate crisis to Brexit farce via alt-right resurgence, neoliberal inequality and the rejection of truth in favour of malleable feeling.  Our future is not looking bright, it’s looking orange (if there’s more Trump and that).  Weathering this onslaught of one thing after the other, our everyman Lyons family boldly goes where a pessimistic media has long predicted we will all end up.

But the Lyons aren’t like most families.  This is because they talk on the phone in group chats all the time.  My own family mostly communicates by a Whatsapp group I set up a few years back.  In it, my sister and parents coordinate my niece’s schedule of educational and extra-curricular activities, my niece herself hijacks the group to use all the emojis at once or to leave voicenotes of her wailing comically, and my mum plumbs new depths of autocorrect mayhem that I am now expert at deciphering.  Conversely, the Lyons, who are split into the five constituent units of four adult siblings and their grandmother, chat through their latest news, pass comment on the world around them and pursue passive-aggressive banter.  In the first example of future technological advancement, they do all this through the voice-activated Signor service, a kind of Alexa-type gadget that actually seems to serve a purpose.

Now, if you thought I was going to make a comment on the family’s diversity, you can get off now.  The Lyons’ ticking of every box in this area might be a socially conscious casting director’s wet dream, but each Lyon is so much more than an exercise in representation, even though their very visibility on screen is significant to communities that don’t always see themselves reflected in their own entertainment.  If, along the way, even some viewers move beyond seeing people as categories and instead view them as individuals, then it can’t hurt for Years And Years to avail itself of the full spectrum of human potential.  So, who are these Lyons onto whom the near future is projected?

Our grand-matriarch comes in the form of Anne Reid (a favourite from dinnerladies), providing a lens on the encroaching of the future into family life that has both the confusion and the liberal attitude of old age.  Rory Kinnear is Stephen Lyons, the settled wealthier son, husband and dad of two, contrasting with his sister, Edith, who has been off around the world on moral missions (played by Jessica Hynes, whose amazing performance as Cheryl in The Royle Family I am currently reliving to great joy).  Feisty younger sister Rosie, meanwhile, succumbs to a more reflexive response to the events that engulf the family, while Danny Lyons, played by Russell Tovey (who should be in more, if not all, things) has a more idealistic approach to the ensuing calamity.

And calamity is what does ensue.  Each episode is interspersed with a number of montages that take us through the course of time, showcasing the family birthdays that mark each passing year as we journey into 2020 and the decade beyond.  Sound-tracked by a choir singing, this change of pace propels us into disaster each time – so much so, in fact, that you begin to dread its every appearance.  I now have a phobia of choirs singing, as they herald bad things.  Inhumane legislation creeps in, international tensions escalate, environments are plundered and, throughout, the British media and public make multiple catastrophic decisions.  Punctuating each of these current affairs round-ups is Emma Thompson (as if the cast weren’t already strong enough), having the time of her life as Vivienne Rook, some sort of Lady Farage (yet, here’s a lie) whose emergent and morally ambiguous political party gradually grows from a fringe movement to a mainstream force for wrong (ring any bells?).

Not only is there the human drama of the Lyons, then, with arguments, infidelity and deep-rooted resentment, but this is compounded by the consequences of the future’s news.  And the nature of compounding, is that it happens over and over (like in The Mandibles by Lionel Shriver).  Each montage screws them more than the one before, and in every area of their lives: employment, freedom, healthcare, housing, human rights etc.  Very occasionally, the relation of this back to the storyline is a touch wedged: some clunking lines swing in overhead to set out the wider political context.  Parts of the technological advancement also tip things unnecessarily from thought-provoking drama to science fiction fantasy, but there’s no reason a TV show can’t be both.  Whatever this is, it’s wildly entertaining, if you can stand the torture.  We’re not yet through all six episodes, but you always know something bad is going to happen, just like with the future in real life.  I’m pinned into my sofa at each viewing on BBC iPlayer and almost crumble under the tension of every time-accelerating montage – here we go again… to oblivion.  It really is potluck who will make it through each episode.  Just like it’s potluck who’ll make it through our real future.

House Of Cards

In about two months’ time, the sixth and final series of House Of Cards will lurch into in everyone’s Netflix algorithms, bringing to a close one of the most Netflix-iest of Netflix-s shows.  I never really knew what House Of Cards was for quite a long time.  People would obsess over the latest instalments, binge-watching recently-appeared seasons like mammoth chores in order to be able to keep up with dinner party discussions.  I would stare blankly ahead waiting for people to finish talking, like I do whenever someone mentions a football, or any other sport.  The odd glimpse I had caught always looked grey and serious, full of older people in suits being stern.  My attention was always tempted away by the likes of Love Island.

But then all this news emerged about my good old pal Kevin Spacey, and the salacious scandal-hunter within me wanted to know what all the fuss was about.  Honestly, it’s political correctness gone mad if a show or film can’t be made in Hollywood without everyone getting goosed and groped and made to feel powerless at the hands of those who exploit their power within a system that protects them from the scorn of the public eye.  It was time for me to judge for myself.

I say old pal, but I really only met Kevin once, about ten years ago.  He was old even then, especially up close.  I used to have a personality that couldn’t get enough of going out.  It was some winter weekend during my earlier days in London, way past midnight, and we were stomping the streets of the East End: myself, a friend visiting from Germany, assorted school pals and a flatmate I knew from university.  There was no special occasion, other than it being Saturday and we being young and alcohol being available in exchange for cash.  Whichever bars we had haunted were closing for the night, but someone knew someone who worked in theatre and was linked to a house party we could join.  These days, if any evening event involves more than one location, I will invariably ghost so hard during the changeover that I’ll be on the sofa in my pyjamas watching Parks & Recreation before the group has arrived at the second venue.  In those days, I was happy to traipse through the rain and cold with only a vague promise of more good times to come.

On arriving, I remember two things.  There was a room in which a lot of young actors were jumping about on a bed dancing to Britney Spears songs.  I didn’t go inside.  Then, in the living room, I recall us passing around Peruvian wine bowls.  This was because a friend of a friend had recently taken part in the BBC3 series Last Man Standing, travelling the world to compete in tribal games and bringing back their cultural heritage to London young professionals for appropriation.  My German friend was smoking out of the window when someone said “Kevin Spacey’s here.”  It sounded as ludicrous then as it does now.  It couldn’t be true.  Yet, staggering down the hall to the toilet, I passed a Hollywood legend, face hidden beneath a baseball cap, small dog at his feet, making a 3am arrival among a crowd under half his age.

My approach to celebrities has always been, for some reason, to pretend not to know who they are.  So, later, when I was sipping from the Peruvian wine bowl and a figure appeared in front of me saying “Hi, I’m Kevin,” my immediate response was to introduce myself casually and ask who he knew at the party.  Some of the boys were work friends, apparently.  My tally of drinks by that point should have had my synapses completely fudged, enough that all inhibitions should have been overrun and I should immediately have gushed that I knew who he was and I had seen him in American Beauty and what was he doing in this dirty flat bringing his face off the big screen to a real-life situation directly in front of me?  Instead, I asked if he wanted some wine and proffered him the Peruvian bowl.  He sipped without hesitation and asked where it was from.  I pointed at the friend who had been on the telly show wrestling Mongolian nomads and, bam, Kevin had beelined for him.  Ladies and gents, this other lad was better looking than me.  Happily cast aside, I knew then that I had a dinner party story that would last the ages: Kevin Spacey had chatted me up.  So, in 2013 when the first series appeared, I could smugly counter House Of Cards discussion with a true story about its star.  Kind of gives you the measure of my life’s value in the grand scheme of things really.

Years later, clicking play on season one, chapter one, there was that face again.  And it was speaking directly to me once more.  For an opening episode, House Of Card’s destruction of the fourth wall in the case of its main character(s) drew me in and on board within moments.  Despite my lack of knowledge about American politics (what is a caucus?), the Underwoods knew they could count on my vote pretty early on.  Kevin Spacey plays Francis Underwood, a congressman in the first series, whose ruthless ambition sees him stop at nothing to get on the seat that Trump occupies today.  And ruthless is a dramatic understatement.  He hasn’t just lost his ruth; he has willingly had it removed, murdered and the body incinerated, with someone else blamed for the crime.  And this is just the sort of Underwood efficiency and ambition I found myself getting on board with.

Wife, Claire, played by an effortless Robin Wright, whose face never moves and yet conveys the most perfect responses at all times, is a fellow Frank fan.  They’ve taken the part of their vows about forsaking all others very literally.  Their pact is to pursue only their mutual advancement, no matter the casualties, as long as they are outside their marriage.  To be honest, this is how most couples look to me.  To keep the drama up, cracks eventually start to break through in series three, but these are ruptured by a very American act, one I can’t even allude to without betraying massive twists of the plot.  When not conniving, Claire is often seen getting into and out of bed, and quite rightly, because she has wonderful pyjamas.  She works late; he works late, and they’re both always immaculately dressed.  I can’t do anything productive past 6pm and can barely keen my chinos on long enough to make it home of an evening.  They both have terrible rowing techniques.  At breakfast, Claire holds coffee with incredible smugness, while Francis cuts an apple into slices, which he then eats from a plate, proving to everyone that he is a psychopath.  They are both awful, but their exploitation of those around them is the fault of those around them that enable it, so you’ll join me in Team Underwood.

However, the Underwoods’ progression becomes rapid and you wonder if they couldn’t have drawn it out more to prevent things seeming so far-fetched.  But, at any point, you can check our political reality and realise that anything can, and does, happen.  Other characters come and go, as nobody is safe.  House Of Cards is not afraid to off anyone.  While some swirl around our power couple with nebulous roles like Jane Davis and Aidan Macallan, others loyally sign up as underlings.  You’ll feel sorry in two different ways for Edward Meechum, but it’s Doug Stamper I find most troubling, a part performed with painful rawness by Michael Kelly.  He is Francis’s Chief of Staff and never has anyone been striving harder for a positive end of year review.  Stamper has sacrificed his health, his relationships and his happiness in order to exceed expectations within his role.  There’s nothing he won’t do.  Taken for granted and never able to enjoy his salary, he must hate fun more than he hates the Underwoods’ enemies.

Roll on, then, November.  I’ll be clearing my diary to find out the Underwood’s final fate, though I will have to ration this to a single episode per evening, as it’s bleaker than an unexpected item in your bagging area and laugh-out-loud moments come at the rate of zero per episode.  Either way, it’s remained solid proof of Netflix’s storytelling chops, but I won’t miss Washington once it’s all over.  That place is dangerous.  See ya Kevin!