Lisa Mulcahy’s contribution to Years and Years keeps an anxious family drama close to its actors. We rate that care for the people on screen, though the programme’s relentless pace sometimes gives them too little room.
Fi1m perspective
The faces hold our attention in Years and Years (2019), even as the story hurries towards its next development. Lisa Mulcahy directs the final two episodes of Russell T Davies’s series, with Simon Cellan Jones also credited as director. We worried about the Lyons family because the actors made the anxiety visible in individual faces. Keeping those people prominent is an achievement in a drama that gives its characters rather too many issues to illustrate.
Stephen Murray and Tony Slater Ling’s cinematography works particularly well at this scale, letting a face make the anxiety legible. Billy Sneddon and Jonathan Lucas edit the jumps through time briskly, while Murray Gold’s music adds pressure that can become insistent. We sometimes wanted a conversation to continue before the next development arrived, giving us longer to watch the actors respond to each other. Mulcahy deserves credit alongside Cellan Jones for keeping the family drama clear, but this is shared work, and we cannot assign every effective choice to one director.
The distinction matters in a career that moves between features, whole series and blocks of episodes. After the children’s feature The Legend of Longwood (2014), which she co-wrote, Mulcahy became lead director on Blood (2018) and directed all four episodes of Ridley Road (2021). Lies We Tell (2023), an adaptation of Uncle Silas, continued her feature work alongside television. These are different jobs, and we would be wary of treating them as proof of a single visual style.
Mulcahy’s emphasis on close collaboration with actors fits what we value in Years and Years. We rate a director who makes a busy programme worth watching for its people, even when the plot is pushing them along too fast. More time for ordinary conversation would make that strength count for more. Start with Years and Years, but do not expect it to offer a restful evening.
Biography
Lisa Mulcahy is an Irish film and television director. She directed the final two episodes of the BBC/HBO series Years and Years (2019), written by Russell T Davies. She was lead director on series one of the psychological thriller Blood (2018) for Virgin Media One/Channel 5.
Her other credits include directing all four episodes of Ridley Road (2021) for BBC/PBS/StudioCanal, episodes of The Tourist (2024) and Sanctuary: A Witch's Tale (2024), and three episodes of The Assassin (2025). Feature films include Lies We Tell (2023) and The Legend of Longwood (2014), which she also co-wrote.
Mulcahy has received multiple Irish Film and Television Academy (IFTA) awards and nominations, including a win for Best Director (Soap and Comedy) for Red Rock in 2015 and Best Director (Film) for Lies We Tell in 2024. She is based in County Wicklow, Ireland.
