The Show That Illustrates the Numbness of Staying Alive
Things go on. Facing the unimaginable, people still get married. They get divorced. They fall in love. Babies are born, and people die. After a while, the nuclear strike is rarely mentioned. The refugee crisis becomes just another peripheral catastrophe. The pandemic is alarming for a while—especially for the elderly, who greet their grandchildren by asking nervously if anyone has a cold or a cough—but eventually becomes background noise. The stubborn impulse to keep going, not to cede to despair, is just too strong.
The (timely) idea of human resilience in the face of constant crisis was what made me want to revisit , a six-part British drama from the writer Russell T. Davies (, ) that aired on HBO last year. The show begins with a birth and ends with is released straight to home screens). Floods devastate the U.K. A financial crisis decimates the middle class. As the Lyonses, the family at the center of the drama, reckon with the impact all of these events are having on their lives, an inscrutable populist leader, Viv Rook (played by Emma Thompson), rises to power.
