I May Destroy You: why Michaela Coel's drama is a true TV gamechanger

There is a moment in episode one of I May Destroy You likely to send the heart rate of anyone who has ever procrastinated into overdrive. Author Arabella, played by Michaela Coel – also the series’ creator, writer and co-director – is about to pull an all-nighter at her agent’s Soho office. The agitated rap of Little Simz’s Picture Perfect soundtracks her journey on a bus, windows typically filthy, through the streets of London. A Twitter star, she has been signed up to write a follow-up to her hit debut Chronicles of a Fed Up Millennial, a book you imagine could have been glibly sold as “a black, British Sex and the City”.

Except, the all-nighter never happens. Arabella assembles her belongings, which include caffeine tablets, into a neat pile. She opens her laptop. The scene turns silent, soundtrack on mute. She stares at her screen, and stares a little more, restarts her music, smokes a cigarette. She glares at the pat sentence on the screen: “So Tina, being in her 30s, couldn’t understand why you, Terrell, also 30s, would take her there on a first date. Nor could I.” The cursor blinks. She Googles a phrase that solidifies both hers and the viewers’ panic: “How to write quickly.” So she takes a break. A Technicolor blur of pink hair and multicoloured cardigan, she meets her friends at a bar named Ego Death – that is, a total loss of one’s identity. A procrastination nightmare becomes a fun night out and then something far more serious. Drugs are taken. A drink is spiked. The next morning she remembers nothing bar a figure looming over her, raping her. She stuffs it down but, as such ordeals have a habit of doing, it bubbles up again.

Since the start of its two-episodes-a-week run last month, Coel’s dramedy – about a group of young, black Londoners navigating friendships, dating and the ubiquity of sexual abuse – has been billed by critics on both sides of the Atlantic as the show of the year. It was inspired by Coel’s own experience of sexual assault, while she was making the Channel 4 sitcom Chewing Gum, her Bafta-winning, pastel-bright comedy, an incident she revealed in her 2018 MacTaggart lecture at the Edinburgh international television festival.

While I May Destroy You is a totally different proposition to Chewing Gum, which followed a 24-year-old trying to balance a hyper-religious family with a growing interest in sex, Coel’s talent for catching you off guard with humour remains. Not least when Arabella’s best friend, wannabe actor Terry (Weruche Opia), tells the police investigating the assault that Arabella’s boyfriend is an Italian drug lord, followed by a “joking!” delivered half a beat too late.

Delving into the feast-or-famine world of London’s creative industries, it shares a central premise with Girls – where Lena Dunham’s protagonist memorably declared that she “may be the voice of my generation. Or, at least, a voice of a generation” – but minus its privilege, set instead in a London where its socially mobile but materially lacking protagonists dance to 00s garage in a gentrified bar, visiting a council flat one day and a shiny publishers’ office the next. Novelesque is overused when it comes to the post-Wire TV landscape, but here Coel gives a feeling of moving between different worlds within the same city a la Hanif Kureishi or Zadie Smith, each contrasting vision of London fizzing with realism.

It is, at its heart, a series about control. It’s about whether self-determination – that ideology central to the neoliberal Britain of Coel’s adolescence – is enough to transcend your past. (In one gut-wrenching scene, Arabella speaks about how the feminist cause didn’t appeal to her when she was younger, because she had been too “busy being black and poor”.) It’s about whether you can stop the people around you making grave mistakes. It’s about whether you can have control over your body, when people do terrible, half-remembered things to you – and maybe even things both you and they can remember, but which are equally terrible. It’s about whether you can have control over your mind, as well, by leaning into self-care, or whether that also is punctuated by painful memories. As the series unfurls, Coel manages to keep control, too, of our emotions, meting out and reining in the trauma as is necessary.

While sexual assault is not the focus of every interaction, or every scene, it does provide the backdrop from which everything else emerges. Its quiet presence shows sexual abuse as something that exists inside our world rather than a threat from somewhere far away – something you or I or anyone else may have experienced without even realising it was happening. It happens to Kwame (Paapa Essiedu), a gay man seasoned in the art of the Grindr hookup. It happens to Arabella again, in seemingly safer circumstances. It happens to Terry in a scenario she initially sees as empowering. It’s traumatic. It’s boring. It’s bureaucratic. It’s subtle.

This is, of course, not the first show to smartly tackle the horror of sexual assault. Unbelievable, Netflix’s 2019 adaptation of a Pulitzer-winning article about a young woman who is treated as a suspect in her own rape case, was praised for showing the injustice inherent in the US justice system as regards sexual assault. However, where Unbelievable was an overwhelmingly dark series – one in which a whole episode could be devoted to the search for a “Bad Man” – I May Destroy You has a rare lightness of touch, with Coel acknowledging that sometimes the Bad Man, or Woman, is already in our field of vision.

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Other scripted shows have managed that, too: Orange Is the New Black, where an inmate, Pennsatucky, continues a relationship with the prison guard who rapes her; and Euphoria, where transgender teen Jules is propositioned by a classmate’s father, spring to mind. But few portrayals have been this comprehensive. In the wake of a storyline between Arabella and Zain (Karan Gill), where he removes a condom during sex – Arabella later describes him as “not rape-adjacent, or a bit rapey: he’s a rapist” – conversations about this practice of “stealthing” were ignited on Twitter. Meanwhile, viewers wondered if there might be more to a story where one character, Theo, appeared to lie about being assaulted by a fellow school pupil in a flashback.

Questions are asked about representation, too. Coel couldn’t have known that 2020 would be as marked by Black Lives Matter protests as it has been by Covid-19; that conversations about everything from defunding the police to racism on the X Factor would be prompted by George Floyd’s killing. Nor could she have predicted that, simultaneously, a bad-faith culture war would emerge. And yet, unknowingly, she wrote the perfect show for a time when notions of blackness are once again being dissected by a white majority.

Her show is set in the creative industries, where offering mentorship and posting a black square on Instagram recently became de rigueur instead of companies and individuals alike questioning their own complicity in “the system”. In this way, the drama is the total antidote to surface-level white guilt: a show that’s simply about black people living their lives, from two gay, black friends, Kwame and Damon – a relationship rarely seen on TV – to the travails of perma-knackered creatives on the hustle, such as Arabella and Terry.

A few weeks ago, the journalist Allison Pearson wrote a highly pilloried Daily Telegraph column praising the series for showing her black characters who are “human beings equipped with the full repertoire of virtues and vices”, adding that “people don’t object to great work that is truly colour blind”. But, rather than being colour blind, I May Destroy You is just not centred on the usual colours, as scenes focused on “white girl tears” and whether veganism is a type of white saviourism lay bare. While Coel was adamant in a pre-show interview with the Guardian that race wasn’t her focus here, her lived experiences mean that this is arguably the kind of series that could only have been made by a black woman.

The Covid-19 era has posed important questions in regard to friendship – another area Coel couldn’t have predicted but that gives the show an extra layer of timeliness. Who are our friends? What can we ask of, and expect from, them? Are some friendships a convenience rather than a necessity? The juddering, non-linear narrative helps manipulate our perception of the friendship between the trio. As in real life, nothing is static, and sometimes it isn’t wholly clear whose side we should be on. There are no cliched antiheroes, or deus ex machinas; Susy Henny, the high-flying publisher who Arabella can’t believe is a black woman, is the same woman who sends her out of her office empty-handed when she tries to get an increase on her book advance, and who declares “rape – fantastic!” when the writer considers using her own experiences in her work.

In a recent Bafta podcast, Coel revealed that Piers Wenger, the controller of BBC drama, had commissioned the show based purely on a conversation with her, rather than a traditional pitch. Wenger was able to give Coel the gift of complete autonomy over her project, and Coel in return could give Wenger an auteur show, a format rarely seen on UK TV. For a series that is all about control, and lack thereof, it is ironic – and cheering – to learn just how much autonomy Coel had over the process, swerving a streaming deal that would have seen her lose the rights to the world she was building. The deal she did form – with UK production company Various Artists Limited, founded by Peep Show creators Sam Bain and Jesse Armstrong, and prestige TV titan HBO – speaks to both its homegrown ease and a sleekness that locates it on the same continuum as Girls, Insecure, Atlanta, or any of the other half-hour comedy-dramas that the US does so well.

I May Destroy You feels like a game-changer for British TV: ambitious and radical, the kind of programme that percolates in your head between its weekly drops (a risk in the age of the binge that has undoubtedly paid off).

Understandably, it may be too triggering for some survivors of sexual assault and rape to watch. But for those who are able to, it has an important message: what doesn’t kill you may not make you stronger, but perhaps it won’t break you, either.

I May Destroy You concludes Monday 13 and Tuesday 14 July, 10.45pm, BBC One and is available on iPlayer