The near future is upon us, on television at least.

In the new BBC drama Years And Years, Snapchat filters have become wearable virtual masks. In one episode of Black Mirror’s new season, a popstar – played by Ms Miley Cyrus – lends her likeness, and more, to a robot doll. And in the Netflix series Osmosis, a new dating app uses data mined from prospective partners’ brains.

These are not ideas about the far-flung future, either. Years And Years imagines life for a British family over the next 15 years. The new Black Mirror series leans hard on the latest tech developments – there is one episode simply about mobile phone use, and another focuses on a hook-up app that takes gameplay to the next level.

We are hooked on near-future drama, because it is so close. It’s part of the fun of the genre, like waiting around to see if hover boards and laceless Nikes would be invented by 2015, as predicted in Back to the Future Part II, released in 1989. Looking forward a few years can be a comfort too. In Her, Mr Spike Jonze’s romantic drama about falling in love with your operating system, the not too distant future Los Angeles is a dreamy cityscape of ambient advertising, soft colour schemes and car-free streets.

Not everyone imagines the near future so cute. In Mr Alex Garland’s Ex Machina, the modernist home of a tech billionaire appeals, but the AI dreamed up does not. The future is usually not nice to look at, as in Mr Alfonso Cuarón’s Children Of Men, which depicts a global fertility crisis in grim, dystopian greys.

This tonal darkness unites the latest television about the near future. The Handmaid’s Tale, adapted from the classic Ms Margaret Atwood book, is a relentlessly bleak study of a theocratic US where women’s bodies are not their own. Like Mr Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror, it sits uncomfortably close to some present-day politics.

This current state of the world is the most obvious reason for near-future drama’s omnipresence. Tech advances, and the fact we are too busy staring at our phones to notice them is, after all, the backbone of Mr Brooker’s anthology series. Real life political upheaval was the spark for Mr Russell T Davies’ venture into the near-future arena; the prolific writer penned his latest series in light of political earthquakes in the US and UK.

But Mr Davies’ concern in Years And Years is with the everyday drama of the Lyons, an ordinary, northern family living in extraordinary times. In the six-part series, familial relationships – how to bump along with less than obliging in-laws, what to do about the uncommunicative teen (the one with the Snapchat filters on their face) – play out against a refugee crisis, the rise of far right and breakout of nuclear war. But these events press upon them, as much as they are pressing concerns. Mobile tech and 24-hour news mean the Lyons are right in the thick of global catastrophe. It is impossible to escape.

More is on the way, at least on television. A second series of Years and Years, Mr Davies imagines, would see climate change take centre stage. The speed of technological change suggests Mr Brooker will not be stuck for future Black Mirror inspiration. The Handmaid’s Tale, meanwhile, is set to run for 10 seasons, which might be more than only dystopia junkies can handle. Time will tell if and when we’ve had our fill of the near future. But we’ll find out soon enough.