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Emma Thompson as Vivienne Rook in Years and Years.Guy Farrow/HBO/BBC/Red Productions

Far be it from me to call a halt to your sweet summer vibe, but I must draw your attention to something. It just finished airing in Britain, where it was called “2019′s most terrifying TV show.” There are no scary monsters in it. Except, that is, for a populist politician played with ruthless precision by Emma Thompson. If you want a dose of the frights about the looming future, it’s here.

Years and Years (starts Monday, Crave/HBO, 9 p.m.) is a six-part miniseries, a BBC/HBO production that is part entertaining drama about the lives of one ordinary family and part dystopian vision of the next 15 years. It starts now, in 2019, and projects into a post-Brexit, two-term Trump administration future. It isn’t subtle and wasn’t meant to be – it’s a polemic that manages to stay gripping and remain humane, even if there is rage and doubt simmering constantly.

Created by Russell T. Davies, who, among other things, revived Dr. Who to huge success and wrote A Very English Scandal, it seems at first to be a sweetly realized portrait of one representative family. That’s the Lyons, living in Manchester. They are good, decent people. There’s Stephen (Rory Kinnear) a financial adviser and loving father and husband. His brother Daniel (Russell Tovey) is a civil servant, a housing officer who is gay and marries his partner in a joyous wedding in the first episode. There’s sister Rosie (Ruth Madeley) who has spina bifida and copes with life using a gleeful sense of humour. The other sister, Edith (Jessica Hynes) is a noted political activist and writer, but mostly lives in other countries. Matriarch Muriel (Anne Reid) is a bit of an elderly grouse, but essentially good-natured. These people and their partners and kids could be on Coronation Street.

But as little family crises and birthdays and anniversaries unfold in the first hour, the news they watch on TV or hear on their car radios puts their lives in context.

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As the Lyons family crises and birthdays and anniversaries unfold in the first hour, the news they watch on TV or hear on their car radios puts their lives in context.Guy Farrow/HBO/BBC/Red Productions

Most striking of all in the news they absorb is the rise of Vivienne Rook (Thompson), a fringe figure rather like the pro-Brexit Nigel Farage. Asked in a TV debate for her views on the Middle East, Rook has a blunt answer. In the matter of Israel and the situation of Palestinians, she says, “I don’t give a monkey’s.” (She also expresses herself, at times, more bluntly than can be repeated here.) You see the impact and you see the both the shock and populist appeal. Rook wants cleaner streets and fewer immigrants. Her presence and her message will overshadow the drama until later she becomes its focus.

Davies manages rather cleverly to hit on every important and worrying development we can imagine unfurling over the next decade. Most of the characters use their smartphones and computers a lot. A teenage daughter to one of Lyons family siblings becomes a bit obsessed with virtual reality. To the point where she wants to become “trans human” and demands to shed her body and have her brain exist in a digital space. Daniel’s husband becomes enthralled by online sources that inform him about what’s really going on – among other things, that germs don’t exist and are part of a big-pharma conspiracy. Fake news and our obsession with social media become plot points. It’s unsubtle when a character pronounces that most people are getting “stupider," but it’s dramatically the right turn of events.

But by the end of the first episode, there’s a truly terrifying development. The drama posits that Donald Trump is re-elected and in his final days as U.S. President takes action that changes the world. What happens is like a sci-fi fantasy that is rooted in an all too real plausibility. There’s been nothing scarier on TV this year, it’s true.

What marks Years and Years as outstanding, for all its underlying polemics, is its humour, wit and tenderness. It’s actually very funny at times and there’s also a raging love story embedded in it. All of that and an uncanny sense of dread lurking always. It’s unmissable, even if it undermines your summer-induced optimism.

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