This is a terrible world, but I want to see every second of it

The political imaginary in the Years and Years miniseries

Abstract

The paper investigates the role of dystopia in the contemporary imaginary, focusing on the miniseries Years and Years. Specifically, we intend to think about how the work materializes a contemporary political imaginary. The hypothesis is that this type of dystopia has become a strong distinctive feature in contemporary audiovisual narrative. The methodology to be used is the qualitative content analysis (BARDIN, 2000), combined with an adaptation of the film content analysis proposed by Penafria (2009). We take “imaginary” from Maffesoli (2001) and to understand the political imaginary, we will use the “mythological constellations” proposed by Girardet (1987), namely: The Conspiracy; The Savior; The Golden Age and The Unity. From there, we established more specific categories that define this political imaginary that we call: The Eternal Presidents, The Dark Ages and The Foreigners, who dialogue with Girardet's categories, but also go beyond.