As climate change causes the world to heat up and the waters rise, so too is a wave of anti-immigration hatred and violence rising up in the UK, and across Europe. And that prejudice is as poisonous and destructive to humanity as the environmental disaster that creeps ever closer, whilst society tries to ignore it. Danish drama Families Like Ours chooses not to ignore either issue, and as such, is not only hugely timely but also tells a vitally important lesson.

The incredibly timely series, available now on iPlayer, is set in the very near future, when the rising oceans have caused financial collapse and rapid evacuation of the Netherlands, and are now dooming Denmark to the same fate. As the drama opens, the Danish government has made the decision that rather than spend money trying to hold back the tide (as the Netherlands did), they will instead invest the money preemptively on resettling every single Danish person in another country. It is, at that point, a highly classified secret, but one man in a position of power, Nikolaj, cannot bear the weight of the secret and tells first his husband, Henrik, and then his brother-in-law, Jacob.

It’s Jacob’s family who become the centre of the unfolding drama as we see how ordinary, middle-class Danes cope with this complete destruction of their lives, as Denmark is evacuated and an entire nation become refugees. Like the waters creeping slowly to reclaim the land, the news at first creeps through Nikolaj’s family setting in rot and despair wherever it touches. Nikolaj and Henrik are wealthy property developers and use their insider knowledge to get ahead of the tide – selling their properties and smuggling millions of Euros back into Denmark, in order to survive the forthcoming financial crash. But,as with the environmental disaster, every minute counts, and by the time Jacob has the news and begins trying to raise cash for his own family, the time is running out and things begin to sink all around him.

Of course, we have all seen apocalyptic movies where families flee water or lava or alien invasion, making miraculous last-minute escapes and performing extraordinary feats of bravery. Families Like Ours is not that story. The wave that chases them is pressure to find a new home, and the feats of bravery are the ordinary, everyday feats that normal people make to be with the ones they love. Lesser dramas would have made Jacob the central character. He’s the Tom Hanks hero, trying to keep his family together through the crisis, including his whiny, love-lorn teenage daughter Laura, who just wants to be with her boyfriend. But writers Thomas Vinterberg and Bo Hr. Hansen are smarter than that, and instead, they place Laura herself as the central figure.

It’s such a refreshing change to see an 18-year-old girl, who is on the cusp of her own life and independence, be the pivotal protagonist in a family drama. And she is the perfect figurehead for the story – a young person with all the hope and belief in the power of good, forced to become an adult who must decide her entire future in the blink of an eye. The future she had planned for herself, living and working and raising children in the country she grew up in, is gone, and now she faces deciding not only where her future lies, but who she will be in it.

Like many young people, Laura’s family isn’t cookie-cutter shaped. It’s complex and divided and spreads out into different arms. She lives with her father, stepmother, Amalie and toddler half-brother, but she regularly stays with her mother, Fanny,  a travel journalist who is recovering from a mental breakdown. Most significantly to her future, she also has a burgeoning romance with her best friend’s cousin, Elias. When all of her family face relocating to different countries across Europe, Laura struggles with deciding where she belongs. Does she go with her father, who seemingly can offer the most stability and best standard of living? Does she go to look after her mother, who is alone and will be sent to the slums of Romania to share a dormitory with a dozen other people? Does she go with her boyfriend, who offers her a chance at a future of her own?

Laura is a huge-hearted young woman who wants only to protect those around her, which includes Lucas, a quiet,young boy Laura has bonded with at the after-school childcare facility where she works. There is a very slight touch of the paranormal about Lucas, who Laura calls her “little crystal ball”. It seems, as the rain pours down and the drains overflow with water that he can see a dark future for his family and country. Though in truth, it is perhaps that he simply has a massive gift for empathy and has tapped into some undercurrent building in the people who are trying to shield him from the fear and dread they are feeling.. But Lucas has another gift that seems to offer him a secure future – he is a hugely talented footballer, who has been scouted by Liverpool FC, and invited to live at their academy. It’s a golden boot opportunity, but even with a world class level skill and opportunity, Lucas still suffers a torn family, because the academy will not allow his mother to come to England with him. 

Each heartbreaking decision, and connection being pulled apart, is delicately played through Families Like Ours, as good people find themselves bending or breaking the law, making decisions they never saw themselves making, and questioning how far their morals will take them when it comes to looking after the ones they love.  It becomes very clear that while money may count to begin with, it’s very easy to become completely irrelevant when lives are on the line.

Fanny’s health makes a salient point about how badly those with invisible illnesses would be, and are, treated, when thin lines are drawn in bureaucracy. While the physically disabled are offered refuge in Norway, mental health and stress “don’t count”, and so only poorer countries are willing to take on those unable to work, or – as with Lucas’ mother, Christel – the low skilled workers. Fanny’s Phd and experience in teaching and journalism are meaningless to the countries offering to take her in, because all she becomes is what she can offer in the now.

The past is a returning theme through Families Like Ours, as culture and traditions which define our identity are suddenly wrenched from the characters’ hands. How we grew up defines so much of how we see ourselves, and so characters like Fanny and Henrick are forced to consider their estranged brothers and contemplate taking those frayed ties forward because it may be all they have of the past to call their own – no matter how painful that past was. 

Henrick becomes a character whose life we see buckle and rip as the strains put on him take  a gentle, wealthy gay man to places he could never have imagined. His fate puts the audience’s heart in their mouth multiple times, as we hope and pray for a better outcome than one that is unfolding.

It is one of the things Families Like Ours does best – subverting your expectations for where the story will go. Things that seem to point to disaster unfolding – a gun put into Laura’s backpack by a concerned father or an ominous drawing of a dead body that’s fallen from a sledge – but each and every time Families Like Ours takes the story in a far more human direction. Because, like in life, it’s not these huge dramatic moments that upturn the families’ plans, it’s the small moments of indecision, bad luck and carelessness which sees the middle-class family begging for food and refuge in foreign countries.

The central love story between Laura and her boyfriend Elias is the moving, heartwarming eye in the developing storm. Through them, we see the resilience of youth, the power of young love, and the blight of a future halted in its path. When Elias finds himself travelling through Europe alone, to reunite with his love, he becomes the victim of the kind of anti-refugee rhetoric we see pedaled in the press today. He is everything the anti-immigration crowd decries – a young, fit man, on his own – so his intent must surely be nefarious? Yet here we see Elias is merely an upright, sweet, young man, who only wants to be with the girl he loves.  While Laura is the central figure for the story, Elias is the emotional heart, and it’s the destruction of his hope and the brutality he faces that drives the plight of immigrants home hardest.

It is, in the end, Families Like Ours most vital and powerful message, in amongst the emotive family dramas – how easy it is for an architect and a psychologist to be homeless with a small child in Paris, or a student accepted to the Sorbonne to be sleeping in a barn in Russia, having paid people traffickers every penny she has. Life, and what we think of life, is fragile for all of us, and be upended in seconds.These are people we can identify with who had previously cared about what car they drove, what clothes they wore, or what takeaway to order, and who are now scrabbling around for a scrap of food and a grain of empathy from strangers.

The story of Laura and her successful, honourable family is a searing take down of the depiction of refugees that we so often see in the media, and a powerful learning tool that should be shown in every school in the country. Jacob and Fanny and Amelia and Henrick are just ordinary people who want to live a happy life with the people they love. Viewers can see that the enemy is not a person who has lost their entire life looking for a new home, but the bureaucracy that sees them only as statistics, and the people who close their doors to the people in need who have lost everything.

There is a point midway through the series when you may feel the bleakness and hopelessness is becoming too much, but just when you do, Families Like Ours will turn the tide.Our protagonists are forced into horrific situations and decisions that seem to break their spirit and rob them of any future, but the joy of Vinterberg and Hansen’s writing is that it’s just at that moment when humanity makes a break for it. The tiny green shoots of hope and life begin to sprout, as we’re shown that just as little things have taken these people down, so little things can build them up. All it takes is a human seeing another human instead of a label, and taking a risk on them, to start rebuilding the lives that time and tide has destroyed. There are moments of such beautiful humanity – a bicycle pedal that needs fixed, a laptop hurriedly passed through a fence, a tearful “I love you” from a man to a boy he now sees as a son – that it’s easy to forget the darkness that gives them impact.

Families Like Ours imparts these important lessons without a hint of piousness or self-righteousness. These are flawed, normal people, with stories and lives just like ours, facing the seeming impossible and having to find a way through it. Laura’s extended family don’t end up where they thought they would, in more ways than one, but yet they still manage to make a life for themselves; to pull themselves up from the brink of lawlessness and put their faith back in love, connection and community. Even Lucas seems to lose his ability to see the darkness in people, healing not just his own pain but that of other characters too. Incredibly performed by the core cast, especially Amaryllis August and Albert Rudbeck Lindhardt, and peppered with haunting traditional Danish music, which speaks to the importance of culture and history in our identity, Families Like Ours will make you sob again and again for humanity and the future that may face us all.

“Who we are right now is who we’ll always be,” says Elias in his high school graduation speech. Let’s hope for all our sakes, he’s wrong.

Families Like Ours is available on BBC iPlayer and Netflix elsewhere.